September 21, 2007 - Matira Beach, Bora Bora

This morning Dad and I set out again on our hunt to find a place to set mom's pearl. Again, no luck. But, we did see some very fancy resorts and I got the opportunity to introduce Dad to the best ice cream bar ever - Magnum Double Caramel. Yum. We also found a beautiful anchorage. I stopped at a local dive shop to ask them about whether we could get into the anchorage with our 6 foot draft. A little way down the road, I stopped at another shop to confirm their instructions. We couldn't get one of the local buses to stop and pick us up, so we were relieved when two guys pulled their pick up truck over to the side of the road and offered us a lift in the back. It is possible that our judgment was impaired by the heat stroke. Gripping the box that we were sitting on for dear life as they careened around corners, we made it back to the dock at Bloody Mary's in record time.

At the dock, we ran into Brian and Nell, and passed along the advice we were given about getting into the anchorage off of Matira Beach. While we were gone, Sten had installed the rebuilt raw water pump on the generator. He also changed the exhaust elbow and installed new injectors in the generator in an attempt to rectify our high load black smoke problem. While he cleaned up his project debris, we threw together a few sandwiches and got underway so that we could get into the new anchorage with good light. Keeping the channel marker close to the port side of the boat, we weaved our way among the coral heads off of Matira Point. The water was so clear, the coral looked like it was only 2 feet under the surface, but somehow we made it through all right.

After anchoring, we went snorkeling. Loads of rays, a turtle, a moray eel, a nice spider conch shell and several fish we had never seen before made for a great snorkeling trip.
As I swam back to Mata'irea, I noticed that Storm Along was heading for a really shallow area. Feeling responsible because they were following my directions for getting in here, I jumped in the dinghy and told them that they needed to turn around. The sun was quite low at this point, and they were now heading directly into the setting sun, making it really hard to read the water. They wound up aground, surrounded by coral heads. I went back to Mata'irea to grab Sten and our masks and fins. While we were trying to get them free, two more cruisers came over to help, one of whom was Stephan from Muline, whom we hadn't seen since we shared an anchorage in Fatu Hiva 3 months ago.

Over the next few hours we tried lots of things to get Storm Along off, but nothing worked. Later that night, when the tide came up, they floated free. In the dark of night they managed to get themselves into a slightly deeper spot.