Atuona was a beautiful town of about a thousand people. We had lots to do. The first thing was to go and check in with the Gendarmes, then buy some fresh food. It was amazing to be on land again, and to see so many people. We visited a grocery store and bought fresh baguettes and ham for lunch. We bought some eggs for a dollar each. I grabbed some very expensive beer. There was a whole shelf of Tim-Tam biscuits, our first indication of the Australian influence in the Pacific. We walked up the hill through the town to a hardware store and dropped off our gas bottles to get filled. Behind the town Hiva Oa rose, with jungle climbing up the steep slopes broken in places by granite cliffs. Atuona was the final resting place of Paul Gauguin and Jaqcues Brel, and it was easy to see why they decided to live here. It looked like the archetype of a tropical paradise.
The town was full of dogs and chickens. We asked someone why the eggs were so expensive when there were so many chickens around, and they said the dogs ate the eggs, and the ones in the stores came from New Zealand. They seemed surprised that I thought a dollar an egg was a lot.
Gorgeous plants grew everywhere in the fertile volcanic soil. Showers came and went but it was never cold. We were only about twelve degrees south of the Equator. It was quite a walk to the town from the anchorage but whenever a vehicle came along on the road they asked if you wanted a lift. We craved exercise after so long, and we quickly learnt to smile and shake our heads as soon as we saw the brake lights come on. We were quick to tire walking up the hills but it was a good feeling. The passage had taken its toll on our fitness.
Ian had lost his windvane oar in the anchorage, and it was going to cost a fortune to get another one. I had done quite a lot of searching in the past for wrecks and things, so I convinced them we would dive and find it the next day. It seemed so easy after the fourth rum. Morning came and there were three ordinary looking divers lining up. I pulled the hookah out and grabbed a length of line. We spaced ourselves along it around six feet and swam a grid. The visibility was about three feet and we were all thinking of the tiger sharks that the bay was famous for. We swam a couple of lines then gave up, but on the way back to the boat Ian found it. We retired to the boat for hot coffee feeling pretty pleased with ourselves.
After a week or so we decided to move across the straight to the next island, Tahuata. The anchorage at Atuona was not calm enough to do work on the boats, and we looked forward to doing some diving and swimming. We travelled in company with Déjà vu and Hueglig, and sailed the five miles or so in a couple of hours. We dropped anchor in a wide bay on the West side of the island. A long beach lined the foot of the bay and limestone headlands formed either end. There were caves to the north and good coral reefs along the edges of the bay.
Russ and I started work on our forestays. To remove the old stay I had to remove and dismantle the roller furling. The foil was held together with set-screws, and some were frozen into place. As usual I dropped a vital part over the side. Ian was there and instantly dived in after it. He could see it fall to the bottom and immediately retrieved it, saving the day. Eventually I had the old stay down and could see that it had started to break again. I made up the new stay with spare wire Russ had on board and reassembled the roller furling unit. Russ also helped me set the rig tension again, and then we headed over to his boat to work on his. We removed his broken furler and I helped him with a few other jobs. By sundown we were ready for a well earned rum.
The following day we decided to sample the diving around the place. Tyrene rocked up and Paul dived with Al and me on the hookah. The coral was interesting, with a forest of hat-shaped corals. There were some fish but we didn’t catch any. That day Déjà vu caught some grouper and ate them. The whole family contracted ciguatera, or fish poisoning. No-one ate any of the Marquesas fish from then on.
We finally ran out of beer. Paul and I decided to take his dinghy a couple of miles south to the town. As we motored around the final point a steep-sided rocky bay opened up to us, with a small town nestled at the foot of the bay. The town was dominated by two churches. The scenery was spectacular, surrounded on all sides by mountains. A French yachty was sitting on the dock doing his wash and having a smoke. We tied up and chatted a while, then went shopping. It was a beautiful place, and it felt s though we were the only visitors. We only saw a few people in the village and they seemed quite shy.
The next morning we had a beach BBQ with the people off the other boats. Sandflies were a bit of a problem but once we had enough repellent on it was very pleasant. We lit a fire in the rocks and cooked up way too much food. I taught some of the kids to body surf in the beach break.

Our next stop was Oa Pou, pronounced Wa-poo. It was a pleasant sail down, and we entered the breakwaters to anchor stern to the beach between the other yachts. We had heard this was the best place to arrange the bond for our yacht. Foreign yachts entering French Polynesia have to post a $1500 bond against the duty payable if they overstay their permitted duty-free time. The bank and transaction fees were high, and we resented the impost. After this was done we went back to the local shop, and met the crew of Pau Hana. Graham and Sarah had sailed down from California with a couple of their friends. They were looking for surf, and were having a party that night. Later we saw photos of a fish they caught on the way down.
Oa Pou was dominated by a set of spires in the centre of the island. The town was very quiet, with a few stores and a couple of hundred houses spread around a big school and the harbour. We spent a few days there, running our chores and filling up on water and some provisions. Then we all decided to move up to Nuku Hiva.

The twenty mile sail over was very pleasant, despite Al and I still being intoxicated from the party the night before. There were light winds and small waves and WE put up the mizzen staysail and genoa for fun. Soon enough we closed in on Nuku Hiva.

One of the classic books about the South Pacific is Herman Melville’s book Typee. It was set on Nuku Hiva in the bays around the main town of Taiohae, our next stop. I had read the book online before we left but I was still not prepared for the breathtaking scenery. The harbour was flanked by high cliffs and was over a mile deep. The town seemed bigger than Atuona, stretching along the long foreshore. There were dozens of boats anchored there. We parked just past the Pardys’ boat, who had just sailed around the Horn. They certainly keep their boat well, and had their rocker-stopper out to cut down on rolling at anchor.

We decided to have a quiet night, and caught up on the sleep we had missed from the night before. In the morning we decided to go into town and get some baguettes for breakfast, and had them slavered in the New Zealand canned butter that was available everywhere in the islands. This was great stuff, it kept indefinitely in the can, and for weeks once opened.
The walk along the foreshore was very pleasant. It was hot, but there was plenty of shade from the trees and there were flowering hedges and gardens everywhere. We shopped a little and walked around the town, happy to be off the boat and enjoying the exercise of walking up the hills. I tried to buy some batteries for the boat, as ours were dying but there were none available. Car batteries were hundreds of dollars. We stocked up on other essentials like Tim-Tams and generally enjoyed the town. There were market stalls on the jetty along with fish mongers, an internet café and a dive operation. We spent a lot of time and money picking up our email.
At this time we also started to think about where we would live in Australia. We spent hours looking at rental properties in Sydney and Brisbane on the net, as well as what jobs were available and how much they paid. Al likes to have everything organised up front, I wanted to live on the boat for a while and see if we liked it. It looked like there was plenty of work in Sydney, though property prices were insane. It was fun to start planning our Australian lives for a while but in the end we decided to let it go for a while and concentrate on enjoying the moment.
While we were in town one day we bumped into a couple we had met in Panama. Sarah was very pregnant and they had decided to have the baby in Taiohae. Their boat was anchored off the point and they had had to move ashore because Sarah was so seasick. They had not had a good passage from Panama. We spent a pleasant afternoon and evening hanging out with them at their little rented house.
There was a big Cat called Alice in the bay with us, and seeing my surfboard they stopped by for a chat. They were also keen divers, and offered to take me diving the next day. We hoped to find some hammerhead sharks. We took their jet powered dinghy out and drift-dived the point at the entrance of the bay. We saw three hammerheads and I filmed them, but couldn’t get close enough for really good footage. It was a great dive, though.
After a couple of days we decided to move around the corner to Daniel’s Bay. This had been the site of the Survivor – Marquesas show a year or so before, and Daniel had scored a new house out of it. It was funny that the show implies the locations are so remote, but an hour’s walk would have found them back in town.
Daniel had lived in the bay for decades, and always enjoyed visits from sailors. We met him with Russ one day, on the way to see the waterfall a few miles behind his property. He helped us stow our dinghies safely and showed us the road to the waterfall. We met up with two French couples and decided to walk up together.
The walk to the waterfall was lovely, with a mixture of forest and farmland lining the dirt road. There were streams to ford and hills to climb, though none of it was very difficult. Half way there we could see it through the trees. This was the second tallest waterfall in the world, falling off the edge of the tall central plateau. It was breathtaking.
The farmland gave way to forest, and we came across a couple of horses. They walked with us for a while, then vanished back into the trees. Finally we made it to the base. We stripped to our swimsuits and crawled through a small rock passage to the pool at the bottom. The water was freezing after the warm walk. It was hard to see the drop of the waterfall from the bottom but the pressure and noise from the falling water was impressive. We had a picnic lunch, including some wind-fallen mangoes we had picked up off the road. They were stringy but sweet.
On the way back we met Daniel again. He made us a cup of tea and we browsed through the guest books he kept of all the visiting cruisers. There were entries from the Hiscocks and other famous pioneering sailors and we were proud to enter True Blue into the latest book. We soldiered on with our broken French for a while and then moved on.
We liked Daniel’s bay and stayed there for many days. Most mornings and evenings we would surf the point break off Daniel’s house, and during the day we relaxed, worked on the boat, and watched the goats on the cliffs above. At various times we caught up with Tyrene, Déjà vu, Hueglig, Alice, Pau Hana, and all the other boats we had caught up with since Panama, so there was never a lack of company.
It was time to go shopping again and the swell dropped, so we sailed back around to town with a couple of the other boats. Our batteries had been getting weaker and weaker. We had a quiet night then tried to start the engine to charge them up. There was just a clanging sound, then nothing.
I needed batteries, and our friends swung into action, and soon we had Russ, Ian and Clive all in the cockpit trying to fix her. I loosened an injector to get any air out and out poured water! The engine was full of sea water.
We removed the exhaust and water poured out, and removed the injectors and cranked the engine dry. One of my 6v batteries was totally dead so we swapped it out for one of Russ’. We re-tensioned the head bolts and reset the valve clearances, and cleared out the engine as best we could. I was devastated, and Russ was incredibly supportive. Finally after two days of hot work we got her running again, but it was soon evident that there was some damage done. We came to learn that the compression was down, making the engine hard to start. The pre-heating elements had been damaged too. From this point on the engine was to be unreliable and hard to start, but we were going again.
It was time to say goodbye to the Marquesas. Russ sailed off bound for the northern Tuamotus and we took him to dinner at one of the resorts to say thankyou for his help. Our boat had his wire and two of his batteries aboard, and it would have been a nightmare to have air-freighted the parts in.
We sailed to a deserted bay on Oa Pou to relax for a couple of days before our next passage. We were headed for Taou, a small atoll four hundred miles to the south.
The Marquesas were everything we had hoped for- remote, relatively untouched by mass tourism, romantic and beautiful. We felt that we were part of an adventure. The small population and wild, untamed landscape of Hiva Oa confirmed that we were a long way from anywhere. I hope that the next time we sail into them that they are not ruined by development and tourism. Surely there is room for one unspoilt paradise in the Pacific.