July 9 - Raiatea

We motor sailed in very light wind and sloppy seas the 22 nm to Raiatea. It's another beautiful island with well marked, easy passes to enter (we used Teavapiti Pass), and motored down the channel inside the reef to anchor near our friends Rich & Jan (sv Slip Away) who we hadn't seen for a while. Dennis & Mary Lee (sv Lardo) had also come over from Huahine, and Slip Away hosted happy hour aboard, inviting our old friends Roger and Marion (the latter warding off a cold so she stayed away) from sv Marionette IV, and new acquaintences Larry and Kim of sv Magenta. The place we're anchored is right in front of Raiatea Carenage boat yard, and we managed to anchor in 25', a minor coup since it's so deep around here that anchoring in 60-70' is not uncommon. The next morning we walked down to the Moorings charter base just to check it out. In the afternoon we upped anchor and motored (directly into the wind, of course…) the few miles to Uturoa (the second biggest town in French Polynesia!), as we wanted to be nearer the town for Saturday evening's Heiva celebrations. Finding an anchoring spot was a bit challenging in the late afternoon, but we snagged a coral head and managed to anchor in 25', although we dropped in 15' of sand! Good thing those coral heads were there, as there's a deep drop off to 100' right behind us! Of course, we'll see how easy it is to extricate our anchor in a few days… We usually set our anchor alarm on the GPS, and last night was one of those that I was waiting for it to go off, but holding was fine in the 15-16 knots of ESE wind. In the morning, Jan, Sue and myself went into town (by dinghy) to do some provisioning. The many stores here are very well stocked, so it's nice to be able to keep the larders full aboard. We're also getting internet which, in case I haven't mentioned it, is very expensive, but at least it's available. Having laundry done is also very expensive, so this afternoon Sue did a load aboard while I ran the water maker. There's been intermittent rain but no heavy wind, so overall this anchorage spot is quite pleasant. Since Raiatea is a charter base as well as popular cruising destination with a fringing reef all around it, there's lots of boats moving around. We'll be exploring more during the next few days.