July 2006

Hello everyone,

I can't deny it, Raivavae, a small forgotten island in the Australs archipelago, far to the south of Tahiti, just at the limit of the tropics, and which I had not visited yet, has won a spot in my "hit-parade" of the most beautiful, the most pleasant, the most protected islands in the world. It's an island that's hard to leave: I had planned to stay three or four weeks there, and my stay has lasted one month and a half... and I'll probably return there in a few months, when the austral winter is over : it's true that under the Australs' latitude, from July to September, the weather is a little too cold for my taste, one doesn't swim comfortably.

So I have lest this beautiful island, after photographing it under all its angles; Nature has been well inspired in surrounding the central, mountainous, steep, spectacular island with a crown of "motu", these low coral islets so typical of the Pacific, that constitute for my shallow draught sailboat a good number of beautiful anchoring spots, and that give a photographer, as you can see on the photographs included in this letter, a good number of superb foregrounds.

So, to return to the warmth of the tropics, I have sailed north once again: a pleasant four day cruise, passing by, in the dark night, a small, shelterless islet called Hereheretue, then heading for the Central Tuamotus, and Makemo atoll. The only real incident in this crossing has been, right from the first night, that my radar (a new set, changed in New Zealand after the previous one had loyally served me for fifteen years) has suddenly stopped working, depriving me of, among others, its "alarm" function, that allows me to sail single-handedly in a much safer way : somehow like the magic circle of ancient witch doctors, one just has to draw an "alarm circle" around the boat, and the radar's buzzer wakes you up, should any danger come close, another ship, a reef or island, even a rain squall bringing stronger winds. For four nights, I had to return to my previous rhythm, using an egg timer to wake me up every twenty minutes, so I can climb out into the cockpit to glance around the horizon, before going back to sleep for another twenty minutes.

On the last night, as I was working my way through a mass of dangerous low-lying atolls (GPS navigation has made navigation much safer in these area), I even had to use two different timers, plus a specially noisy ringing tone on my cellphone, for I was afraid of missing the alarm and waking up, as happened even recently to lots of sailors, perched on one of the low lying reefs of the Tuamotus.

And here I am, after a two year loop around the western Pacific, back in the magical Tuamotus, decided to relish again, in the next few months, their grandiose and lonely beauty, the strong, hard to explain sensation of being "at the frontier", almost on another planet, that grasps you on these coral rings, of which many are uninhabited. Here, I will work on my next book, memories of my life, which has already reached a count of over 900 pages. I'll tell you about it.

See Ya.