Australasia > French Polynesia > Society Islands > Tahiti > Cruise > Articles > A Leeward Breeze

Half way between the Tahitian islands of Tahaa and Bora Bora, we heave-to. The big catamaran lolls in the swell as my shipmate Maggie gently lowers Yurtle the Turtle (as she has nicknamed him) into the water. Tahaa restaurateur Leo Morou had found Yurtle in the local fish market, mournfully awaiting a culinary fate, and purchased him not for soup but salvation.

"This is, I think, the 730th turtle that we've released since 1992," Leo had told us while standing in front of his small hotel and restaurant, L'Hibiscus, on the shores of Tahaa's Haamene Bay. At a market price of up to US$100 per creature, that's a fair commitment to turtle liberation. Leo asked Maggie to do him a small favour and Yurtle a large one.

"We've tagged him for a University of Hawaii research programme. When you've sailed out well past the reef, just put him in the water. He'll know what to do," said Leo.

The collective noun Tahiti loosely refers to the totality of French Polynesia - five archipelagos and some 120 islands, scattered over four million square kilometres of ocean. The Society Islands archipelago is the most famous, because it contains the island of Tahiti, the capital and gateway to French Polynesia. Amid the northwestern Society Islands is tiny, somnolent Tahaa.

With a population of some 4000 Polynesians, 40 Europeans and 50 tourists, Tahaa makes Papeete seem like Manhattan. Because of its numerous plantations, this is known as "the vanilla isle"; at times it smells like a giant vanilla milkshake. The coral beaches aren't particularly good, but just offshore we find several motus (atolls) with sandy beaches and coral bommies with excellent snorkelling. Unlike some of the more developed Tahitian islands, Tahaa retains that distinctly Polynesian quality - simultaneously energetic and ethereal - which once gave this archipelago the title of Les Iles du Rêve, the Islands of Dream.

Since life in these islands is defined by the sea and its comings, goings and colours, the best place to witness it is from almost sea level - the deck of a boat. And you don't need to be a millionaire to do so. Hunt up a small group of friends in order to defray the cost and charter one of the well-maintained fleet yachts based here. If you have a competent sailor or two among your group, book a "bareboat" charter; if you're not confident about handling a boat, the yacht base will provide (for a fee) a qualified skipper. The boat can be fully provisioned with food, if you request, so that all you need do is fly in, step on board and sail away.

Five of us have booked a roomy, 14-metre, Jeanneau Lagoon 47 catamaran (named Toulouse Lautrec) with four en-suite cabins and a full galley for a week's cruise among the Leeward Islands group. Ancient Polynesian marae platform altars and lagoons the colour of a computer-enhanced postcard are among the unscheduled intrusions into our fairly vague itinerary, as is Wednesday's song and dance night at Leo's Hibiscus pub on Tahaa.

Half a dozen good ol' Haamene Bay boys amble down the quay with not much more than their pareu wraps and preferred musical tool - guitar, garbage bin string bass, ukulele or wooden slit drum. They're soon in tune and the Hibiscus is soon on fire. Hinano beers handed up from the audience start to kick in and soon we're all taken up in the riptide of that Tahitian music - soaring harmonies, blazing ukuleles, flying fingers and plenty of laughter. Then out from the wings sashay the dancing girls - the grass-skirted, teenage vahines of Haamene Bay have come to kick proceedings up another notch. With their tresses flying and those gimbal hips pounding in hyper-drive tamure time, it's one of those nights that, if you can remember it at all, you'll never forget.

Next morning, before we sail for Bora Bora, we take our dinghy farther up Haamene Bay to an overwater hut that we've been assured produces Tahiti's most prized souvenir, the black pearl. At Pauline's Pearl Farm, Madame Pauline welcomes us aboard, then runs us through a crash-course in black pearl culture, demonstrating how the pearl nucleus is artificially introduced into a shell before it is re-immersed in the sea for three years. Not surprisingly, she also has a display cabinet and a credit card machine - after all, tourism is Tahiti's largest industry - and we leave with a collection of black pearl ear-rings and necklaces costing around half the price we might have paid in Papeete.

Out in the channel beyond Tahaa's reef, it's time to release Yurtle. Leo had said that the turtle would know what to do. Quite right. As Maggie eases him over the stern of the catamaran, his flippers feel water - and suddenly he's out of the blocks like an Olympic sprinter. Not sticking around to say merci, Yurtle hurtles. It's the best thanks we could have.

A reef's necklace of surf flares beyond a lagoon of improbable blues; dolphins escort us through the pass; faces in the street seem to have stepped from a Gauguin canvas. Home to all this the Leeward Islands, some 200 km northwest of Papeete, are a perfect ground for yacht cruising. Distances between the islands are not great (generally around 20 km or less) and broad lagoons provide plenty of good anchorages.

Most charter cruises here start from the yacht base in the pretty Baie de Faaroa on Raiatea, an island that assails the visitor with aromas of vanilla, copra and frangipani. After we've stowed our gear and marvelled at the Toulouse Lautrec's numerous creature comforts, Stephanie Betz, a skipper from the yacht base, runs us through the catamaran's operations before we take a quite lagoon cruise up to Raiatea's "capital", Uturoa.

Although the town's main street is basically a long row of shops plus a market building (and, curiously, a Chinese Kuo Min Tang meeting house), it's clear that change is on the way. The town wharf is being dramatically enlarged to accommodate large cruise liners.

Quiet and verdant, Raiatea (the name means "clear sky") is set within the same reef system as Tahaa and flaunts its topographic centerpiece - a two million-year old, extinct volcano. Once known as "Sacred Havai’i", Raiatea was the traditional centre of Tahitian royalty, religion and culture, and its main attraction is the massive Taputaputea marae, the largest and most sacred site in Polynesia. From its ceremonial stone platforms you can look across a lozenge-blue lagoon to the Tea Vamoa reef pass, through which the great double-hulled migration canoes paddled around 800 years ago to settle both Hawaii and New Zealand.

We haul the sails and lope over an easy swell towards the island of Huahine. Fare, the principal town, is not much more than a main street and a wharf, but with the constant coming and going of ferries, yachts and copra boats, it's still an authentic Polynesian port. For surfers, the pass at Fare harbour features good, barrelling left and right-hander waves. As with most of the Society Islands, a protective reef surrounds mountainous Huahine; moored for the night within its lagoon, we can sit in the bow mesh and watch rays scudding across the shallow sand bottom.

The Islands of Dream, the Isles of Venus: Tahiti's constellation of peaks and myths still basks in the romantic literary afterglow wrought by Paul Gauguin, Herman Melville and the Bounty mutineers. Indeed, Paul Gauguin almost invented our idea of Tahiti - ever since he stormed Paradise with a paintbrush in the 1890s, the world has seen Tahiti principally through the prism of his imagery. Ironically, Gauguin's iconography is now so ubiquitous across Tahiti's tourism industry that if he hadn't existed they would have to invent him.

I think of Gauguin as the prototype yuppie dropout, abandoning Paris, his stock-broking job and family for hoped-for liberation in the fabled South Seas. However, he soon scandalized Papeete's colonial bourgeoisie with his inclination to absinthe and adolescent mistresses. Self-exiled to the Marquesas archipelago, after a burst of profound creativity, he expired miserably in 1903 from the effects of social diseases and more-than-social drinking.

Despite this ignominious exit, "Paul Gauguin" is back in Tahiti - this time as a 320-passenger cruise liner of that name. The irony, even though it may be lost on the Papeete bourgeoisie of today, might amuse - or enrage - the painter. Should "roughing" it in comfort on a charter yacht not be your style, then consider cruising on a vessel like the MV Paul Gauguin or the 21-cabin MV Haumana.

Whether I'm under sail or power, my thoughts in Tahitian waters always wander to the British ship whose departure from here in 1789, after a six month sojourn, gave rise to the most famous rebellion in maritime history. When HMAV Bounty's sailors saw the extraordinary verdure of Moorea's peaks slip behind them, they knew that Paradise would too soon become Portsmouth. Their recent lives as high caste Tahitians, enjoying clean food, fair weather and generous female companionship, were being swapped for a return to the quasi-slavery of the English seaman. More immediately, they and their first mate, Fletcher Christian faced the unpredictable ministrations of Captain William Bligh, including lashings by his tongue and sometimes "the cat". The blue water opera of the mutiny on the Bounty was about to begin.

Several hours sail from Raiatea, we reach everyone's idea of "postcard Polynesia", the volcanic tiara peaks of Bora Bora island. A hula hoop reef of surf and low motus circles a wide lagoon whose depths seem colour-coded in deepening tones of blue. Bora Bora snoozed in history until Japan's 1941 attack on Pearl Harbour, when it was suddenly "invaded" by 4500 American GIs arriving to build French PoIynesia's first airstrip (and to leave behind 130 offspring). Since then, the world and tourism have well and truly discovered Bora Bora, with some 25 percent of French Polynesia's hotel rooms being on this island.

Shallow-draught yachts like ours can almost circumnavigate Bora Bora inside its lagoon. Having dawdled past villages, glamorous over-water hotels and tiny shoreline chapels, we drop anchor in the shadow of the tombstone peaks of Mt Otemanu. Below us are talcum-white sands and those drifting rays. On shore, in towns like Vaitape, I see older Tahitian women garbed in long Mission dresses, pedalling to church on their bicycles on Sunday morning. Meanwhile, kids, decked in surf gear and ponytails, zip by on trail bikes.

Off Motu Taurere, we don masks and snorkels, and slip into a rip surging in through the reef. Like a horizontal waterslide, it takes us on a free ride through reefs and bommies stocked like a free range aquarium, with colleges of surgeonfish, ranks of fusiliers and shocks of tiny, electric-blue chromis fish - in fact, almost everything that swims is here but Yurtle. I repeat this ripping ride three times before heading back to the Toulouse Lautrec which, appropriately, sits at dusk like a painted ship upon a watercolour ocean.

Such is our time before the mast in Tahiti - until departure becomes as inevitable as work and taxes. We hand the helm of the good ship Toulouse Lautrec back to Stephanie Betz and watch her sail off into the blue. Soon after, my first sight of the check-in clerk at Bora Bora airport reminds me of how Man Friday must have felt when he saw Robinson Crusoe approaching.

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