Ever since we first sailed to the Tuamotu archipelago 15 years ago, Seth and I wanted to dive the famous South Pass of Fakarava Atoll. At that time, we were still new to ocean sailing and certainly to scuba diving. We were partway along our first blue-water journey, our voyage around the world, and we were both in our early 20s. Seth and I had sailed Heretic, our primitive 38-foot copy of the Sparkman & Stephens yawl, Finisterre, from Maine through the Panama Canal and across the Pacific to French Polynesia. Before the voyage, we had both been small-boat sailors and racers, but those 10,000 miles were our first offshore ones. As for scuba diving, we were complete novices. We had only breathed underwater for the first time in the British West Indies while en route to Panama. In the Galapagos, we had earned our advanced dive certifications. In the Marquesas, we had made our first dives from Heretic without a guide. We were keen on our new sport, but little did we know that when we reached the Tuamotu atolls, we would be hooked for life.
Tuamotu means “many motu” in the local language, a motu being a coral islet. It’s a perfect name for this great arc of coral atolls stretching more than 1,000 miles across the South Pacific.
Diving in the Tuamotu is all about sharks and fast currents. Most of the diving takes place in the passes that lead into the atolls, and on an outgoing tide, these passes are dangerous for sailors and divers alike. The ebb pours out of some of the lagoons at speeds exceeding eight knots, generating steep standing waves as it sets against the wind. Beneath the waves, the outflow creates a ferocious down-current, potentially lethal to any diver caught in it. All drift dives are consequently done on flood tides, going into the lagoon. Sailors navigate these passes at slack water or at the beginning of the flood, when the surface is calm and the current negligible.
The largest atoll of the archipelago, Rangiroa, has one of the strongest currents. When Seth and I sailed there 15 years ago, we managed to time our arrival for slack tide. Given that we were arriving at the end of a six-day passage (from the Marquesas, the archipelago about 600 miles to the northeast), our favourable timing was mostly luck, but we took it and wafted through the placid pass under only our genoa. Then we rounded the corner into the anchorage, tacked up into shallower water, luffed into the wind, and dropped the hook. We were true sailing purists—and also impoverished 20-year-olds—and we never used our engine if we could help it. A few hours later, while taking a walk ashore, we saw what Tiputa Pass becomes on the ebb: With dolphins leaping from the steep white water, it was quite a sight, and not something we would want to be caught in.
The following day, on the flood tide, we slipped underwater to experience Rangiroa’s phenomenal diving. We began by backrolling into the open ocean, right into a school of barracuda and then descending to a school of gray reef sharks. I remember marveling at the otherworldly sensation of floating weightless in a water column that felt as clear as air and being surrounded by the predators who live there. Then we let the current take us into the pass, and we flew along faster and faster. It was exhilarating to the point where I ran out of air and had to breathe from the dive guide’s extra regulator. Toward the end, a huge manta ray was turning somersaults right in our path.
When Rangiroa’s fringe of palms dipped below the horizon in Heretic’s wake about 10 days later, we vowed we’d come back someday. Through a series of very lucky circumstances, we managed to do so nearly 12 years later. We had sold Heretic by then and had bought another old classic to replace her, Celeste, a 40-foot, cold-molded wooden sloop designed by Francis Kinney, editor of Skene’s Elements of Yacht Design.
In 2018 we again made the long passage across the Pacific to French Polynesia, this time from Mexico. After a week or so in the Marquesas, we set off for the southern end of the Tuamotu chain, to an atoll called Hao. The first time we’d sailed from the Marquesas to the Tuamotu, we’d enjoyed a pleasant and even-keeled, if slow, six-day amble downwind. This time would be different. Our angle on the trade wind was a close reach and the breeze was strong. Instead of swaying before the wind wing on wing, we punched into head seas for 4.5 days under triple-reefed main, jib, and staysail.
Now in our 30s, we were too conscientious to rely solely on luck for either our weather forecasting or timing our tides. And so, of course, we got worse weather—strong headwinds — and we got the tides all wrong. (In fact, our tide tables were wrong.)
Once inside Hao’s lagoon, it was quick and pleasant work to skim across the water to the anchorage.
The anchorage was in fact a crumbling wharf, convenient, and very sheltered. Hao is a sleepy place without any tourist infrastructure. The atoll is the site of the former French military base from which nuclear tests were launched between 1966 and 1996. Until fairly recently, no one was allowed to visit the place. Seth and I were curious to see it. Underwater, we were saddened to see the state of the lagoon: murky, much of the coral dead, and with significant debris, seemingly thrown there at random. The lagoon was fortunately not what Jacques Cousteau called the “universal sewer,” but it did seem to have been the trash heap. There were a surprising number of reef fish and eels despite the debris and algae-covered coral.
In a place like this there are no scuba operators. So, Seth and I were thrilled to be invited to join the Fafapiti Diving Club, a group of French teachers at the local school on Hao who had come together to buy a boat and an air compressor. These French divers were all very skilled and rather risk-loving and so preferred to make deep dives on the coral walls outside the lagoon entrance. Indeed, that is where most of the big critters were: reef sharks cruising above seemingly infinite schools of red bigeyes; manta rays turning lazy circles just below us at 140 feet and occasionally above us; schools of rainbow runners and sometimes a big tuna or amberjack; once or twice a five-metre-long tiger shark.
After two months between Hao and an even more remote neighboring atoll, it was time to sail back to the Marquesas, where we planned to leave Celeste for the cyclone season after our visas ran out. We rode the back of a low-pressure system east for two days beneath overcast skies—easy reaching under genoa and single-reefed main—but we were slower than the system, and soon we were back to clear skies and trade winds well forward of the beam. We had a splendid reward for our upwind sailing, however, when we dropped anchor in the moonlight all alone among the spires of the famous Baie des Vierges on Fatu Hiva.
We spent the following year entirely in the Marquesas, but in 2020 we returned once again to the Tuamotu. This time, our main destination was the place we had long dreamed of diving: Fakarava Atoll.
Fakarava lies in the middle of the Tuamotu arc and is one of the largest of the group, its coral motu encompassing a lagoon with a surface area of over 1,000 square kilometers. Two passes lead into the lagoon from the ocean—the mile-wide Garuae Pass in the north and the narrow, coral-lined alleyway of Tumakohua Pass in the south. It is this pass that has made the atoll renowned among divers and has led to Fakarava’s status as a UNESCO biosphere reserve. The coral reefs are brilliantly alive, hosting thousands of reef fish, from little dartfish hiding in the coral to behemoth Napoleon wrasse that can tip the scales at 400 pounds.
While we had expected our passages to and from Hao to be more or less upwind, we hoped to repeat the easy downwind passage we had made 14 years earlier. Instead, Celeste took us for a fast gallop to windward. With the wind well in the south—and thus forward of the beam—and the combined wind and swell height reaching 12 feet, it was a wet and bouncy ride. With only jib and staysail up, we had the lee rail buried nearly the entire time and were shipping so much water over the bow that we couldn’t open the centre hatch for air. As we plotted our noon position each day, however, we found we were consistently making our fastest runs ever: 180 miles each day and that in a boat with only a 28-foot waterline. We covered the 550 miles and raised the atoll in only three days.
Upon arrival, we decided first to dive Garuae Pass, and this turned out to be one of the most adrenaline-pumping dives I’ve ever done. We would backroll into the open ocean just outside the pass during the height of the flooding current, and then we’d make a rapid descent to the coral shelf at 120 feet in order to keep from being swept into the lagoon before we’d seen anything. Down at depths close to decompression limits, we would hook onto outcroppings of dead coral and stare out into the blue at the parade of reef sharks. The current flowing over us was occasionally so strong that it threatened to tear my regulator out of my mouth. I’d made decompression dives before, and wreck dives well inside submerged ships, but this was thrilling, exactly the sort of challenge I’d hoped for.
Tumakohua—South Pass—was beckoning, however. To get there, Seth and I sailed Celeste the full length of Fakarava’s lagoon, nearly 40 miles along the coral motu lining the windward side. The protected waters once again made for superb sailing. Instead of pitching against head-seas and shipping green waves over the bow, Celeste heeled cleanly and flew along through the flat water. When we’re offshore, Celeste’s tiller is usually hooked up to her wind vane, but inside these lagoons we instead attached the tiller extension and stood out on the windward deck, steering her like she was a dinghy.
The anchorage off the South Pass is not protected, however—it’s open to quite a lot of fetch across the wide lagoon—and so is only comfortable when there is little wind. Therefore, we were unable to dive the South Pass as much as we would have liked. Every time the wind got up, we’d retreat seven miles upwind to a perfectly protected bay tucked into the southeast corner of the lagoon. But when we could anchor near the dive site, it was spectacular.
I have never seen such pristine coral than where we began the dive at the drop-off at 90 feet down. Plate after plate of it staircased into the abyss. The first time we went, we were visited by five of the most enormous eagle rays I’ve ever seen, but the sharks were the stars of the show. In the mix were a species one doesn’t often see: blacktips—not blacktip reef sharks but the open-water species that are faster and more energetic. Just as in the North Pass, we drifted into the lagoon with the current, skimming over beautiful coral and colourful fish until we ascended beside a ball of snapper, scales shimmering in the sunlight.
But sailors like to sail, so after as many dives as we could do, we set off for the less-visited atoll of Toau. We made the trip in just a couple of day-sails. First, we had a perfect downwind trip back north over Fakarava’s smooth lagoon, and then after a night’s sleep, we exited the lagoon at slack tide and swayed downwind over the swell. We anchored in several different spots on Toau over the next week or so, doing a few dives from our dinghy, snorkeling, walking the beaches, and getting to know the few residents. Then we returned to Rangiroa.
The overnight sail to this largest atoll, the site of so many of our best memories from our round-the-world voyage, was the sort to make any ocean sailor forget all the gales and upwind slogs he’s ever made. I had one of those night watches you don’t want to end, ghosting downwind with 12 knots on the quarter, a clear sky glittering with stars overhead, and phosphorescence shining in the wake. Perfect.
At first approach from the sea, Rangiroa looked the same as it had on our first visit 14 years before. But once we had dropped anchor, we realized that it now supports both a much larger local population and more tourists. There were correspondingly more dive and snorkel boats, but happily it didn’t seem to have affected the marine life. While we didn’t see any manta rays this time, we instead were approached by an inquisitive great hammerhead. Being investigated by this iconic and critically endangered shark while floating 50 feet down, a quarter of a mile out to sea, in the disorienting world of the bottomless blue ocean, was an unforgettable experience.
On our first visit, we had circumnavigated Rangiroa’s lagoon, reveling in the flat water and brisk winds, one of us always on bow lookout for coral bommies (most of the lagoons in the Tuamotu remain uncharted once you get away from the pass and village). We had taken about a week over it—the lagoon is nearly 1,500 square kilometers—and we’d stopped at several lovely motu, the two of us all alone with the coconut trees and the reef fish. That little cruise had been perhaps the biggest highlight of our entire trip around the world. We knew we wouldn’t be able to replicate it—most of life’s best memories cannot be—and so instead we focused on diving the pass and the outer reefs. We did a couple of sunset dives, during one of which we saw big schools of tangs and surgeonfish spawning in little dances in the water column. But before we left the atoll—and French Polynesia—we did make two more sails over the rippled lagoon. Once again, we had the beautiful palm-fringed motu to ourselves, and we passed a few lazy days strolling the coral beaches and snorkeling from Celeste.
We sailed back up to the pass on the day of our departure for our 2,400-mile passage to Hawaii, sliding through at just the start of the ebb. As we went, we were visited by Rangiroa’s favourite residents, its pod of bottlenose dolphins, perhaps the same dolphins we had seen leaping clear of the standing waves all those years before. Rangiroa was every bit as wonderful as we’d remembered, and we were every bit as sad to be leaving.
And so, once again, as we watched Rangiroa recede in the waves astern, we vowed to ourselves that one day we’ll return.