Ua Huka turnaround

The last Monday of the trip we woke at dawn to see the captain enter the extremely narrow canyon where the boat must unload, where due to the shallowness of the little narrow necked bay the boat must pivot on itself and back in and still anchor far from shore.  The Aranui 3 was specially built to have a shallow draft so it can get into the atoll lagoons and tiny bays but even this beach is a stretch.  The turnaround is thrilling.  The narrow, twisty canyon has low rocky ledges under sheer cliffs, the waves surge up to the ledges which are only out of the water at lower parts of the tide. The Aranui arrives at a time the ledges are exposed, and someone has sunk severally pylons into these rocks, a mile from shore.   the two whale boats are lowered each with a steersman and a sailor to leap onto the rocky ledges carrying the lines of the Aranui.  The sailor has to tug the heavy loop of the line to the front deck of the whaleboat, attach a lighter line so he can leap over the gap onto the slippery wet ledge, tug the loops to the pylon and voila. But not so easy! One of our sailors leaped successfully but the lighter line came loose so he had to leap back on and off. Meanwhile, the helmsman is having to gun the outboard just enough in time with the surge to bring his sailor within a safe leap to the rocks and still not ram the whaleboat on the rocks. Scary!

Then once the line is secured the Aranui backs and turns swinging so the prow is out to sea.  Amazing in a tiny spot.  On our boat as passengers were several retired navy guys, Rolly of the Snow family especially, and he kept oohing and aaahing and explaining to us how technically difficult all the Aranui endeavors were. 

Of course it's not just thrilling its an extremely beautiful spot. 

On this stop there is a tiny village Vaipae`e that has an exceptional museum. Apparently Marquesan pieces of extreme quality from the past collected by the Hawaii missionaries were furnished to the local carver over the last twenty years and he made exact copies. Nowadays The wood carvers make grooves To create designs but The harder more beautiful way is to carve in reverse having the lines of the designs be raised. And these carvings -- stilts, paddles, war clubs-- were all done this way. Unfortunately we wiped these pictures by mistake. There was also a gorgeous piece of Tongan tapa and a lot of actual stone and wood artifacts from the site.  This island had a not very successful mission but the missionary wife made exquisite drawings of the local women's tattoos, the only drawings that exist of what women looked like. 

The other great thing here was the ukulele maker.... Which Craig has written about...

This island also has beautiful red lava and our crew says it looks like the Grand Canyon,  well we hated to disillusion them so we didn't. But it was very very pretty.   We crossed a ridge and came down along shallow lagoons where down in the water our driver could see turtles. We could see squat but we trusted him,  

We saw one of the best me'ae here.  We hiked high high up a mountainside, only about thirty of us, I think I wrote about this already.  

And the last fun was getting back to the boats in the whaleboats through the surf.... Out past the rocks with the birds.... And a sunset journey to Nuku Hiva and our Polynesian night festival.