The Captain’s 60th birthday on March 19th, turned out to be several days of celebration in the most well known atoll in the Tuamotus, Fakarava.
We were back on a well known turf to us, and stopped first at the South pass to dive The Wall of Sharks, which supposedly has 700 sharks living there. It is absolutely our favorite dive in French Polynesia, and we got two dives in, before we moved on.
We moved to an anchorage called Hirifa, which is a well protected area in the south east corner of Fakarava. It is a much beloved anchorage for cruisers, as it has room for many boats, and there are several activities that are well suited to do there. It is a great spot for kite surfing or wing foiling, standup paddle, long walks on the beach, snorkeling and swimming, etc.
This is where we had planned to meet up with a few boats we know from before, who were joining us for the birthday party the day of.
The birthday started off with beautiful weather. This is definitely not the worst place to celebrate this big day! The birthday morning celebration routine went as follows; birthday song singing, opening gifts and having calls with our family back home.
Then, the time had come to start enjoying the day, and one of the presents the captain got, was Michael from SV Gerty who offered to be his activity buddy for the day. He lent us his twin tip board he normally uses to kite with, and drove the captain around the anchorage.
The captain had planned a three course dinner, and had invited three other boats to attend. We were seven people attending, as we were missing Jill from SV Gerty, who was home in the US for a few weeks.
The birthday celebration went on for a few days after. We moved anchorage up to Rotoava, which is the main city in Fakarava. We were lucky that the supply ship was a couple of days late that week, and were able to stock up on much sought after fresh produce.
One of the birthday presents was a dive in the North pass, which we never got around to do last time we were here. We had booked with a local dive club, O2 Diving, and went to their dock early in the morning, to head out.
This is the largest pass in the Tuamotus, and not easy to do alone. We were happy to have an awesome guide, and really enjoyed our two dives. We saw lots of diverse fish, corals, sharks and a manta ray and eagle ray.
The birthday boy made an awesome video from the dive in the North pass:
In the evening, we had booked a table at the best restaurant in town, Hirinaki Lounge, which we also missed last time we were here. We enjoyed cocktails (very seldom in these parts of the world) and a steak dinner together with Laura and Chris from SV Zephyr and Michael from SV Gerty.
We are now enjoying the last couple of weeks in the Tuamotus before we start heading west, to the last archipelago we will visit in French Polynesia, the Society Islands. We have been to two of them, Tahiti and Mo’orea, briefly last season, but still have quite a lot to explore.