After an overnight sail from Ua Pou, we landed at Tahuata, which is one of the three inhabited islands in the Southern Marquesan archipelago.
Tahuata is the smallest of the inhabited islands, there is only 700 people living there. Most of them live in the village on the Northeastern side of the island.
We anchored in Hanamoenoa Bay, on the Western side of the island. This bay is also known as manta ray bay, as it has a good food hunting ground for these giants. The mantas are spotted there regularly, and our hopes were riding high on getting the chance to swim with them.
On our second morning, in the middle of breakfast, we spotted them in the bay. We threw on our snorkel gear and jumped in the water as soon as we could. We were so lucky that we had the manta rays circling us for 30 minutes.
The kind of manta rays we saw came get up to 5.5 meters wide. We guess the ones we were swimming with were about 3 meters wide, so quite large. They did not seem to care that we were there at all.
It was a little intimidating watching the manta rays getting closer and closer towards us with their mouths wide open. However, they are filter feeders and have no teeth, so no danger to humans. They mostly live of plankton and jellyfish when at the surface, and may eat smaller fish at the deep.
We enjoyed another few days at this beautiful anchorage, which has the best water for snorkeling in the Marquesas. We met Mareike from SV Moana again, whom we first met when we were on the hard in Aruba. She had a friend visiting, and we enjoyed a sundowner on their boat and at the beach together.
We really enjoyed this anchorage in terms of water activities and relaxation. However, we also became eager to get to the next archipelago, Tuamotus. It is completely different than the lush and mountainous Marquesan islands. It consists of flat atolls with white sandy beaches and palm trees. There, we can expect to find crystal clear waters, and some of the world’s best snorkel and dive spots. For the captain, this is the area he has always dreamed of sailing to.
As we live at the mercy of the weather, we always make our plans in line with the forecasted weather. As we realized that the wind was going to pick up and stay consistently high over the next 14 days, we decided to speed up our exploration of the Southern Marquesan Islands and head toward Tuamotus to get in before the bad weather hit.
As a result, our exploration of Tahuate ended with this one bay. We decided to go to the nearby island of Hiva Oa to provision as fast as we could, before heading towards atoll paradise, the Tuamotus!