Honolulu Star-Advertiser © Susan Scott
August 12, 2013
PALETTE, Tahiti » After a two-month rest at home on Oahu, I’m back in Tahiti preparing my 37-foot sailboat, Honu, for a six-week voyage through the Society Islands, part of French Polynesia.
Polynesia is the key word for me, because Tahiti carries the same warm Polynesian spirit that makes Hawaii such a fine place to call home. Also, people here know the word Honu, a term that means green sea turtle in Tahitian as well as in Hawaiian. We are turtle fans together.
Tahiti gets a lot of negative press among cruising sailors, a judgment I find so unfair that I’ve become as staunch a defender of this stunning island as I am of Oahu.
Look past the crowds of Papeete (population about 140,000), the traffic congestion and the high cost of living and it’s easy to see how Tahiti became synonymous with paradise.
The island’s rugged green mountains plunge into clear, turquoise water packed with coral reefs. Here in Marina Taina, about five miles from Papeete, I don’t even have to get in the ocean to be astonished by Tahiti’s marine life.It’s like living in the aisle of the Waikiki Aquarium’s South Pacific exhibits.
Honu is parked in a style called Med mooring, common here and in the Mediterranean. In this system, instead of finger piers, rubber pillows called fenders separate boats at their sides. There are variations of Med mooring, but generally the skipper drops an anchor off the bow, backs the boat to the pier and ties the stern there.
This is tricky to pull off gracefully, but that’s not the hardest part for me. To protect the back of the boat from getting banged up during tide changes, ocean swells and motorboat wakes, the stern must be tied 6 to 8 feet off the concrete pier.
This means that to get ashore I must walk the plank, a long, narrow, always-moving board lent by the marina. Each journey to dock and back is an adventure that comes perilously close to a swim.
Last week, however,I came to look forward to my plank walks. Below my shaky knees swam a rare pipefish (a sea horse relative), a 15-inch long lion fish as big around as both my outspread hands and a dozen kinds of damselfish and butterflyfish.
This confetti parade of fish was there feasting among the dock pilings’ growth of pink and yellow cauliflower corals packed together like a lush vegetable display.
I called to a marina worker to come see Honu’s stunning visitors. We hung over the edge of the dock watching the lion fish fan its pink, blue and brown fins as it herded prey along the coral wall.
“C’est beau,” Sam said, agreeing with me that the scene was truly beautiful.
After the lion fish disappeared, Sam watched me struggle with my flexing wooden gangplank and later returned with a wider, more stable aluminum one that makes my life — and fish watching — much easier.
Aloha is not a Tahitian word, but the people here sure live its spirit. It’s easy to see why Fletcher Christian of HMS Bounty fame didn’t want to leave.