Marzipan Doom

We set out to find Hiva Oa for the second time this morning. Well, for the second time, this morning. It should have been a 60 nm sail, so we left pre-dawn at about 4:30am to get there by happy hour.

[There’s no photos in this post because nature was trying to wrench me out of the boat and crush me against her rocky, salty, drowny bosom while said adventures were occurring.  To make up for it, I’ve used extra adjectives!]

Our first attempt at the island was on day 26 of our month-ish-long crossing from Costa Rica to the Marquesas. We’d been getting SE winds for a few days, and had our hopes up that we’d be able to shoot straight for Hiva Oa, one of the ‘big’ Marquesan islands (and more importantly its fresh-veggies, cold-beer, young-women-we-assume having-towns). Naturally, the winds didn’t cooperate, and we ended day 26 looking straight into a SW wind, almost from the exact heading we needed to go. Fuck it, there’s a northern island group, right? Let’s go to Nuku Hiva. It’ll take us an extra day, but at least we won’t have to bang into the wind all night.

So we did that and Nuku Hiva, then Ua Pou, were great islands. Got wifi, fresh veggies, cold-overpriced-beers, no women, and tattoos. Well, I got tattoos. The old coots declined to join me. But, to bring this rambling narrative back to its point, we hadn’t quite managed to hit Hiva Oa.

Ok, so, we head out again for Hiva Oa, and the winds aren’t cooperating. They’re, once again, coming from the exact direction we need to go, and with Kia Ora’s shitty pointing, we need to sail about 50 degrees off the wind to make any forward motion. Once we got out into the open ocean and realized as much, and then that a 60 nm sail at 50 degrees off-wind means 120 nm in reality , and we would be nowhere for happy hour, we once again, sagely, said fuck-that and sailed instead on a direct course to Ua Huka.

Now, Ua Huka is famous for being the first island, first land, we sighted after 27 days at sea. At the time, it hit my soul like a bag of Doritos after five beers (which is to say, incredibly well). Today though, as we sailed towards it instead of towards Hiva Oa and all its wifi and happy-hourz, I was a bit disappointed.

Doubting soul, repent.

Ua Huka, on approach, had almost enough eyeball-fucking glory to make me forget my forced sea-celibacy. The western half of the island was bright and clear, rays of light cutting through the early-winter squalls of June in the southern hemisphere. The land gently sloped upwards from melty-green shores to circus-tent peaks, all smeared in a lime green foliage. Really, it resembled the marzipan forgery of (half) an island.

On the east, though, Ua Huka showed a different face. The volcanic fury that burped forth the western half, and then was politely forgotten like so many mid-meal eruptions, had apparently not abated in the east. The geography was dark and harsh and sharp, with sea-cliffs dropping hundreds of feet into torrid green waters smashing up against the coast.  The mountaintops were lost in black clouds that dumped drowning rains down the grey landscape, spewing foaming waterfalls out into the ocean over 400′ cliffs.  Like, super dramatic.

These two Januses met at Baie D’Hane, our destination. Set deep into a volcanic fjord, the only visible part of the bay was a stark rock outcropping, 200′ high, that looked like the unholy offspring of the drunken, first-date, back-seat-of-the-bus, raw fornication of a stone golem and a tiburon shark. As if, to welcome you to the Baie, they had set out the titan-sized defender of Prague, circa 1580, mitigated only by a 20′ light tower that thankfully refused to illuminate at night.

We sailed into this hell-maw, crashing upwind through the waves like a rubber mallet through stale french loaf, and caught our breath. Rain beat sideways through the valley to our north. Blue-black rollers thundered against the valley wall to our west, reverberating like doom to a steady reggaeton beat. It was 3:30pm, and nearly dark.

I was impressed. Well done, Ua Huka, well done. You ain’t no ones’ side bitch of an island.