Nuku Hiva

 The festival on Ua Huka came to an end, and on 19/12 we moved on to the neighboring island – and the main island of the Marquesas – Nuku Hiva. First of all, to recover from the overload of activity and the stressful, annoying anchoring during the festival, we sailed into a deep and beautiful bay called Taipai, where only two other boats were anchored, and at a comfortable distance from us. What a relief! We stayed there for three or four nights, doing very little, apart from a short walk and visit in the tiny village and eating croissants and pain o chocolate (surely misspelled, but never mind) at a local bakery.

There is a historical site there with stone statues of the old-time locals, but also another, rather surprising and interesting statue made of wood, commemorating a visit by a famous person to the valley. The famous person is Herman Melville, the author of the classic novel “Moby Dick”. (By the way, despite it being a classic, and despite it being about the sea, I never managed to read that book.) When he visited the valley, he was not famous at all, but a young man working on a whaling ship who took advantage of its stop in Nuku Hiva to desert. In order not to be caught, he fled the main village and, by accident, arrived in this valley, inhabited at the time by a tribe of notorious cannibals. To his surprise, he was welcomed there and stayed for several weeks, an experience that later led him to write his first book, which describes the events – not entirely accurately. This is the book I am reading now, and I’m enjoying it immensely, because it feels like not that much has changed in the valley since then (well, they’re no longer cannibals), and I really love the sensation of being inside a story. One could say that this entire journey we are on is about stepping into the great adventure and sailing stories I read as a child: Jules Verne, “The Children of Captain Grant”, and many more.

The Marquesas Islands, which we love so much, also have a few drawbacks. One is the sand flies, known as nono’s – because you really don’t want them. They are tiny, invisible, and you only feel the effect of their bites several hours later. During a beach visit, Ayelet was bitten, then scratched badly for days, and since then she is hesitant to go ashore, as it’s unclear how effective mosquito repellent really is. The second drawback is that even in bay anchorages – including very deep ones, well protected from the wind – swell somehow finds its way in and makes the boat roll at anchor in a way that can be quite exhausting. Some bays roll more, some less, but it’s almost always there. There are various tricks people try to reduce the rolling – for example hanging a bucket in the water from a long pole sticking out to the side of the boat – but it only helps a bit and doesn’t really solve the problem. Somehow, during the previous season we spent here, it bothered us much less; this time, more.

A “flopper stopper”

After three or four days in beautiful Taipai Bay, we moved to the island’s main town, which serves as the hub for all the boats in the area: this is where you do shopping, laundry, fuel, boat spare parts, and so on. It’s a large bay, comfortably holding about sixty boats without crowding. Some are permanently anchored here as their owners’ homes, others are left for several months while the owners travel back home, with someone from the permanent community keeping an eye on them.

As we entered the bay, we spotted the yacht Mayari – a huge 77-foot catamaran – on which Tomer had worked for about nine months, until last August. After anchoring, we went over to visit, to meet the crew he had worked with: a French skipper (Alex) and his Brazilian wife (Fernanda), and to see the impressive and very comfortable boat, which is also designed with excellent taste. Overall, Tomer had a good experience working with them, but toward the end the loneliness of being the “third wheel” with a couple seemed to take its toll.

In town we properly restocked, and on Christmas Eve we visited the church service, which was a bit disappointing: instead of singing the way we like, the priest treated them to long-winded sermons. 

Christmas in Nuku Hiva

The next day we did a walk that was really just a hitchhike up to a mountain viewpoint overlooking the bay, followed by a walk back down the road with stunning views.

We then sailed to the north of the island, to a bay we had loved on our previous visit, where we had also spent time with a lovely German couple, Hans and Eva, who have been living on their boat for 28 years and raised their two children on board. The bay is still gorgeous, but the wind and swell direction turned it into an excessively rolly anchorage. An attempt to anchor in the neighboring bay – yes, also beautiful – didn’t improve things, so we returned “to town”.

We thought we would stay just one night (we were picking up headphones from Mayari that Tomer had forgotten when he left), but we were told there would be a nice New Year’s Eve party, so we stayed – and it really was pleasant. A community center event with decent food, and more dancing in the style we had seen at the festival, on a smaller scale, but this time with the addition of Tahitian-style dances, which are very different from those of the Marquesas.

To conclude this return visit to the island, we moved to Ayelet’s favorite bay of all – almost completely enclosed, very well protected, with high cliffs plunging steeply down into the water. We calmed down there for about five days, with a short visit ashore to a settlement of about ten houses, and a meal at a local “auntie’s” place, where she cooks an excellent local menu: grilled tuna steak, roasted cubes of breadfruit, and a grated fruit salad of papaya, mango, and pomelo. The day before, I had visited by kayak and returned loaded with fruit (including a whole bunch of bananas), which I tied to the kayak with considerable effort.

Fruit here has several important meanings. First, the locals are extremely generous and love to give visiting strangers fruit in large quantities – huge banana bunches, pomelos, limes, avocados, and mangoes. Second, among sailors, fruit is a status symbol: if you have a net hanging off the stern of your boat, overflowing with fruit, it means you’re one of the serious, around-the-world sailors.Wwe have such a basket too. And finally, fruit is important because it’s almost impossible to get vegetables here – so you eat a lot of fruit.

We decided to move on to the next island, a short sail of about six hours. I felt again something that keeps recurring throughout this journey: on the one hand, the desire to continue onward and experience new places and landscapes, and on the other, the difficulty of leaving the comfort of a protected bay with a safe anchorage. It seems to me not a bad metaphor for life in general – the wish to keep growing, developing, and seeing the world in every sense, versus the fear of what’s to come and the challenge of leaving behind what is familiar and comfortable.

And, as you’ll see in the next chapter, there was indeed reason to be concerned…