The Atoll Before The Atoll
We entered Makemo through the northern pass at an hour before local noon with the tide slack and the pass running gently outbound, which is the only way to enter Makemo if you have any respect for the boat under you. Tuamotu passes are not harbour mouths. They are the single gaps in a coral rampart, forty to two hundred metres wide, through which a lagoon of some hundreds of square kilometres breathes tide twice a day. At maximum flow you get standing waves, eddies the size of a small boat, and a current of five knots that will put you on the coral before you have finished deciding. I had lost a rudder in an east Tuamotu pass twenty years ago. I had never forgotten the specific embarrassment of being pulled off a reef by a fisherman who had watched me make the mistake from his outrigger.
We did not plan to stay at Makemo. We took on water, topped up the diesel from drums at the co-op, and left within six hours.
The atoll before the atoll — which is how I had started thinking of it, and how I now think Eloa had been thinking of it before me — was Napuka.
Napuka is not on most itineraries. It lies at the northeast end of the Tuamotu chain, 14°11' S, 141°17' W, a low atoll about seven kilometres across with a single village of perhaps two hundred and fifty people, accessible by cargo schooner every four to six weeks and by a small airstrip that operates when the wind is below