Pitcairn Island to Mangareva, Gambier Islands Feb. 6, 2004 – Feb. 8, 290 nm

The short three day hop to Gambier was over seemingly just after it started. After all these long passages it was strange to realize that we were going to have quite a long while of relatively short ones. The winds were great, in the high teens the whole way, and we arrived at the Gambier Islands group on Feb. 8. The engine cut out as we went through the wide southeast pass over the reef on our way in so we had to sail through the atoll and narrow passes through the coral to get to the anchorage.  I went below and plotted a number of GPS waypoints that would take us around the dangerous coral heads between the islands.  Stephanie did a great job sailing us from waypoint to waypoint while I tried to get the engine going.  Finally I gave up and we sailed the boat through the well marked, but narrow, winding channel and dropped the anchor in front of the town of Rikitea. It was great to be in a calm anchorage for once and we both slept like the dead that night. 

Further investigation into the cause of the engine failure revealed that the electric fuel priming pump connected to the starboard fuel tank was full of gunk and was blocking fuel flow. I removed the pump, ran the diesel fuel return line to the port tank, manually primed the engine, and everything was copasetic.

Check in at Rikitea was relatively smooth. We went ashore in the dinghy, tied up at the town pier, and asked for directions to the gendarmerie - a ten minute walk to the south. Inside, the police pulled double duty as customs and immigration officers.  They stamped our passports and checked us in to French Polynesia with a minimum of hassle.  They apologized that they would not be coming out to inspect our boat because they had no boat of their own!  The ranking officer was from near Paris, and was spending a two-year assignment on Mangareva as part of his military service obligation.

There were few other boats in the anchorage but only one appeared to be inhabited, a 45 foot power boat with twin steel hulls.  Across the stern was painted the name “Bounty Bay”, a place we had just been, so we went over for a visit. Aboard the Bounty Bay we met Graham, the skipper - a New Zealander, and his first mate Kathy, an American.  Graham had done his PH.D. dissertation on the birds of Henderson Island, near Pitcairn, and knew the Pitcairners well. He was now the captain of his own oceangoing vessel and made his living taking adventurers and cargo to Pitcairn and other remote South Pacific islands underserved by airlines and  scheduled shipping.  Graham gave us a lot of helpful local knowledge about the atolls in the Tuomoto Archipelago, our next destination, and told us where to go to see a rare and endangered sandpiper.

We stuck around Mangareva for a week doing a little hiking and sightseeing and then headed north for the Tuomotos - in order to keep our schedule we needed to be in Tahiti in the first week of March.  The Gambiers would be well worth a return visit since we didn’t get a chance to visit any of the other islands in the group.