In Fletcher's wake...

Crewman Carl Barlev allows us to read his personal journal -

Part one from Pitcairn to the Marquesas

"3 June 2007

PITCAIRN ISLAND
We arrived from Easter Island in a record 8 days with the trade winds
pushing us along at an averaging ~7 knots. We had a day/night ashore
each and were billeted out to the various households for looking
after. I'm sure Alex would like the fact that everybody drove
quad-bikes around the island and in 'town' (no cars anywhere). Lots of
bananas and papaya everywhere and my hosts let me cook banana pancakes
for breakfast (Turi & Darralyn - website?).

Christian's cave was pretty cool, but St Paul's Pool was by far the
most impressive: Coastal volcanic rock-pools with powerful swell
smashing into and over them with even just a moderate swell. On calm
days they're great for swimming snorkling. I missed the calm day...
wow... so powerful... white water surging and spraying around the
rocks. The locals say you should see it during a storm!

I asked at the post-office what the difference was between the 'Air'
and 'Sea' options for their postal services (they have no airfields).
"Everything gets shipped to New Zealand first. From there, the 'Air'
mail gets priority treatment. And the next supply ship is in
August!!!"

So basically, airmail was twice the price for a 3-month service
(instead of 4 - or same time if to NZ)....

ILES GAMBIERS
Having made such good time en route to Pitcairn, we decided to stop by
the Gambiers on our way to the Marquises. Imagine a diamond-shaped
outer reef & island-line, 17 miles long, full of shallow water, coral
reef heads and several large islands (see photos)... We anchored off
the Village on Mangareva for two nights. I took a few VCs to another
smaller deserted island for some snorkeling on the first day...

White sandy beach all to ourselves, warm clear water, fresh coconuts
waiting for me to break them open... and lots of bright,
multi-coloured fish... of course.

On departing the Gambiers we anchored off the outer-reef for lunch and
went snorkeling again. I saw a couple of small (four foot) reef sharks
and followed them for a while. Our engineer got a little anxious when
three of them started circling him with a bit too much interest.

FIRST RAID
So yeah, on our last night anchored at Mangareva we had party on board
and invited crew from some other yachts in the bay. The four crew from
Impression were invited too (nice flash superyacht). Their deckhand
and engineer were Paul and Glenn, about our age and from the UK and
South Africa respectively (?). Anyway, while Sam and I showed them
around our ship, three of the others slicked over in the tender and
had a good look around, came back with a nice hammock, hat and
squeegie...

Sam and I however, didn't realise that the raid had been planned and
we were actually joking with Paul/Glenn about the fact that they were
probably being raided, as they indeed were. Later that evening
Paul/Glenn invited Sam and I over to show us around on Impression. We
still didn't realise the raid had taken place, so went along...

luckily they didn't notice the missing items and Sam/ I returned safely.

As they'd been such nice guys, we convinced the others to let us
return the bounty the next morning as we were hauling in the anchor
(much to their disappointment). The Impression crew still hadn't
noticed that anything was missing (the only valuable item, hammock,
belonged to their cook Jo)... Anyway, they were all good humoured
about it and agree to pay us back when we see them in Tahiti!

One - Nil to Soren Larsen... bring it on!

POLYNESIAN NAVIGATION
With 900 miles to the Marquises, our Capt. Jim decided we should test
our navigation skills once more. This time we not only turned off the
electronic equipment, but we weren't allowed to use the compass or
sextents either!!!

So we set sail with just the stars, sun, wind and sea to guide us, our
log-line to estimate our speed... and Jim's almanac as we didn't have
any polynesian elders to tell us which stars to follow. On the sixth
day we spotted land on the horizon, or rather a slightly darker cloud
it seemed. Our bearing was spot on, but we couldn't be sure of range.
At 3150 feet, Fatu Hiva was theoretically visible at ~67 miles on a
clear day, which did give us an upper limit.

How far off were we? How accurate had our log-line been?

Jim arranged a sweepstake: $2 per guess, with bets closing at 1700...
winner takes all... and my bet paid off.

MARQUESAS
So yeah, been here for about a week now, at various islands and
sights. Sam and I had quite an experience at our first stop, Fatu
Hiva... a long story and I'm running out of time, so will have to wait
til next time...

Right now, I'm sitting down by the beach in Nuku Hiva... on my laptop.
Most of the major anchorages in French Polynesia have Wifi in the
habour's for the yachts. We're anchored a bit too far out though, just
on the edge of reception, so I've come in to sit by the sand instead.
Sitting against a cute little shop wall (too dangerous under coconut
trees). There's a dance/music festival on just down the road and a
local guy watching Spiderman with a mate on his laptop just next to
me. I've updated him already on our progress (Soren Larsen) to date...
in French... and he understood.

Not bad I thought... Although most certainly, grammatically incorrect :)

AND
The water here is ~29 degrees... and I've discovered the
'Pomplemousse'. A huge, delicious, lime-green colour, sweet
grapefruit...

That'll have to do for now,

Carl"

See Steve's pictures of landfall in Pitcairn and Marquesas

Read Part two here

Soren Larsen will be visiting these destinations again