Start point – Society Islands
Last year my wife, Nana, and I explored the Tuamotus Islands that are located northwest of Tahiti. This year we decided to fly to Tahiti again but explore a little more, starting with the Society Islands, known as the leeward Islands of the French Polynesia, on a boat, Paje, owned by a Brazilian couple (Mario and Paula Maia) that gave up living a standard life in Brazil to live onboard a Lagoon 55 foot sailboat. The island chain is suspected to have been named by Captain James Cook stating in his journal that he called the islands Society “as they lay contiguous to one another”. As we arrived in the airport I saw lots of people arriving with surf boards to catch the first big south swell of the season. Since we knew that the waves were pumping, a plan was made; buy as much food as possible, fill up the tanks of the boat and start our journey of South Pacific surf exploration to our first destination, the south pass in Moorea Island. We had a hard time entering the lagoon, the pass is quite narrow, shallow and the waves were really big, making the channel almost close out! Our boat, Paje, had the chance to surf its first big wave as we surfed through the narrow channel into the lagoon. Once in the lagoon, life was easy for the boat again; even dolphins came to meet us as we were the only boat on the anchorage.