Goodbye French Polynesia

By this time our French Polynesia visas were nearing their end. From the day we arrived in French Poly we had only 90 days to complete our travels and get to a place we can officially check out of the country and promptly leave. We could have checked out on Tahiti, but then we would have had to sail right on past a few cool islands on our radar. So, we chose instead to do our check out on the island of Ra’iatea – one of the most westerly islands in French Polynesia.

It took us another overnight sail – about 120 nautical miles – to go from Mo’orea to Ra’iatea with nothing much of interest taking place. We are quite accustomed to overnight sails by now, breezing through them without much drama to speak of. We had done this sixty-odd times already by now. Arriving in Ra’iatea in the early morning, we motored through the reef passage and found our mooring field outside of the only place we were told we might find a place to fill our propane bottle. We were desperate, on the final dredges of cooking fuel as all other options in our past month had fallen through. In the end, Ra’iatea pulled through for us by fulfilling our cooking fuel needs with only a one-day turn around.

With that situation worked out we rounded the island to dock at the “marina” where the immigration offices are located. The docks are extremely limited, and are always in use by cruisers doing the same task as us. It is also the only place within hundreds and hundreds of miles with a fuel dock, which also gets a bit of traffic. There we began the 3-day process of checking out of the country, heading off to a secluded anchorage while they process all the paperwork… by pigeon apparently. I can’t imagine what takes 72 hours to complete. Mexico does it in 15 minutes. If they can, so can any other country on the planet.

Nevertheless, three restful days later we returned to the dock for a half-day to retrieve the paperwork, visit the grocery store and chandlery one more time, and to fill our diesel jerry cans that had been used in the recent weeks. This would be our final fuel – or so we though – until Tonga, some 1300+ miles away.

And on that day we “officially” said good bye to French Polynesia, but we were not really leaving just yet. We found another secluded anchorage were we could stay out of trouble during the gray-area of immigration status; checked out, but not yet gone. Here we enjoyed the sunset with Bora Bora in the foreground, then got to a good night of sleep. By sunrise we had the anchor onboard and were splitting the two sets of breaking waves on either side of the pass to start yet another sail westward.