We arrived in Cook’s Bay, Moorea Thursday morning after an all night crossing from Toau in the Tuamotos. The Tuamotu Islands are remote, unspoiled with fantastic diving, but we felt after 5 weeks we were ready to see what many people call the most beautiful islands in the world. We’ll let the pictures speak for themselves.

Kids’ heaven here.

View of Tahiti 

As we mentioned in our last post we continue to meet interesting people. In Toau, we anchored next to a custom 64′ sailing boat that had just arrived from Valparaiso Chile – 5000 miles, 30 days. They were waiting for a weather window for the final leg of an 8 year circumnavigation to Tahiti. The boat was built in Tahiti of Aluminum and the former owner of a Tahiti Shipyard was onboard for the circumnavigation. After sharing two nights of cocktails and hearing the many stories, we decided to run with them for the passage to Tahiti. As the wind lightened we slowed down to 7.5 knots, then it picked back up, and after pushing Gray Matter to 9.2 knots near our maximum speed – we let them run ahead and continued to Moorea. Yes – sailing boat: 1 – powerboat: 0.

On entering Cooks Bay – we saw the Nordhavn 57 Time 2 at the end of the Bay, so anchored next to Mike and Lynn from South Africa. They are also circumnavigating – so we have shared more than a few cocktails over the last couple of nights. Yesterday Nordhavn 52 Dirona arrived, so last night Gray Matter hosted the first “Nordhavn Pacific Rally” cocktail hour. Nordhavn should send a sales rep quickly, we could be writing orders all day long.

Three nordhavn.

The last but not the least, we have to show this picture taken at Fakarava, one of the Tuamotu islands. It was full moon, a squall just passed. We were having dinner outside. And there was a full rainbow across the dark sky. Our first rainbow at night. Amazing.

Enjoy the pictures, and we will update the next post with our “dinghy drama”.

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