Magic in Makemo

After we covered thousands of nautical miles in March and April, I got an email yesterday from No Foreign Land that told me we went a whopping 170 miles in May (NFL for us is not related to the sportsball but instead is the social media app/tracker for sailboat cruisers that you can check on on our homepage where we are). A big na dzrowie (Polish for cheers) to taking it way slower here this past month! Our bodies and souls needed it.

While it was hard to leave the clear waters of Raroia, we had one dodgy carrot and half of a month-old cabbage left for fresh food and were due for a resupply. We set our sights onto Makemo Atoll, which is a one overnight sail from Raroia, about 75 nautical miles (nm). The passes in and out of atolls require some timing so that you go through the pass as close to slack tide as you can to avoid strong currents and standing waves. It’s always a guess as to when slack tide will be, but you hear what other cruisers faced as they leave or come and check the tides as best as you can.

As we left Raroia, we actually sailed rather than motored out of the pass under our favorite sail, our trustworthy staysail, with no knots of current against us and no standing waves. We sailed mostly under staysail alone to get to Makemo, which is helpful since either one of us can handle the staysail at night alone while on watch. Also, we were trying to go as slow as we could so that we would arrive at the Makemo pass to enter around 7am, which we thought would be slack tide. While we arrived right at 7am, it wasn’t actually slack tide, and we still had some roiling waters and about 2 knots of current against us, but Horizon handled it beautifully and it turned out to be a non-issue.

Makemo is one of the more populated atolls in the Tuamotus, with around 800 people across the small town Pouheva and the motus that ring the northern part of the island. We spent two nights in town where we delighted in the one restaurant so that we didn’t have to cook (pizza!), pre-ordered our viennoiseries from the market-turned-bakery which you pick up in the morning (pains au chocolats et baguettes!) and resupplied on the small supply of fresh produce we could find as well as more beverages.

The town anchorage is not well protected from any wind that has a southerly component, so we reluctantly left cell phone service and the “hustle and bustle” of town to go to the more protected anchorage on the southeast side of Makemo nine miles away. We dropped anchor right by our friends John and Nicole on Satori and promptly got down to business that evening with an afternoon of pétanque (bocce) and a beach bonfire.

I’ve heard many cruisers talk about sailing as “the highest of highs and the lowest of lows”. Life always brings ups and downs, and they seem to be amplified on the ocean due to difficult conditions, things constantly breaking due to the relentless movement of everything on the boat (imagine if your home was being rocked back and forth every moment of every day), communication breakdowns, fatigue, and also wonder at the magic and glory of our planet, from the Milky Way Galaxy to the phases of the moon to glorious sunsets to unicornfish and sharks. If the highs weren’t so high, none of us would be out here trading the relative ease of life on land for the wonder and awe of life on the water.

We spent a week and a half at the southeast anchorage, having beach bonfires at night with new friends from across the world and visiting with folks that live on the motus. I’ve now gotten brave enough to bring my ukulele to some of the beach get-togethers and sing and play. My ability to speak French has been wildly helpful in a way that I was too dense to realize in advance of getting here — hello, it’s called FRENCH Polynesia — and I feel like after a year here, Conor will be able to speak some French too! He can already understand a lot of French after having worked at a French-Swiss company and listening in on conversations I have with people.

It’s been a lot of fun to hear sailing couples’ origin stories — the how we met and how we got engaged stories. Among this crowd, I’ve quickly realized that we are in the minority of folks who are still on their “practice marriage” — many, if not most, cruising couples are onto their second marriages. We’re working on continuing to “practice” even with the challenges being on boat together brings!

We’ll be spending more time in other parts of Makemo over the next few weeks and continuing our slow pace. We’ll get to our third atoll…sometime?!