Makemo Atoll (Peter)

After departing the Marquesas, we faced a short passage of only 2 or 3 days to our first island in the Tuamotus. We use a simple 4 hours on and 4 hours off for our watch schedule. This gives us plenty of sleep, but we’ve found that on the shorter passages it can be difficult to get into the rhythm. The trick is to really sleep during off watch, even if it is daytime and you aren’t yet very tired. Ginger uses her eye mask to block out the light.

Before long, we found ourselves at the pass to the lagoon of Makemo atoll, ready to enter even though it was later in the day than ideal for spotting shallow patches and coral heads.

The pass was not a problem, at least the time of day was right for favorable current. We anchored in the last minutes of daylight and set the alarm for exploring early the next morning.

The next morning revealed a sun drenched world of blue lagoon, blue sky, clear water, and white sand. We went ashore and explored the village on streets of crushed coral.

After exploring, we headed back to Marcy. Ginger set up a banana hammock, as we had been taught, to dry our extra bananas.

The water was enticing, so clear and with such brilliant colors. We jumped in.

Occasionally a distinctive ominous shape would cruise by – reminding us that we weren’t in an aquarium.

Time passed, we swam, explored, ate and slept. The bananas cured. We felt it was time to move away from town, so we sailed inside the lagoon to a deserted spot.

Ginger prepared a wonderful lunch to celebrate.

We snorkeled and hunted fish with the speargun, explored the beach and found an old cemetery.

We stayed here until we realized that our cooking gas was about to run out. It was time to move on. After another sail down the lagoon to the other entrance, we dropped the hook intending to stay the night. Unfortunately, Marcy was soon inundated with pesky flies, so we quickly went to plan B and just headed out the pass to the next atoll on our list, Fakarava.