First Impressions of Hiva Oa
The Spectacle arrived in the Bay of Tahauku, Bay of Traitors, in Hiva Oa yesterday evening. The spectacular mountains, ridges, and cliffs made for excellent scenery but cast a false dusk on our approach and anchoring attempts. The bay appeared larger on the charts and in the cruising guides, but we selected a nice position behind the breakwater. As we took some relative bearings and began the anchor watch process, we noticed that everyone had out stern anchors as well. The rule is that you must anchor how everybody else is anchored, so we prepared to drop the stern anchor as well. Andy and I had never done this before, but it seemed to work out fine.
The next morning, it appeared that it had not in fact worked out fine. All of our relative bearings were way off, and we estimated that we had dragged a solid twenty-five feet or so. In a large anchorage, a bit of a drag is not too big of a deal as long as the boat appears to be attached to the bottom in some substantive way. Usually you can just dump more chain out and be reasonably confident that you’re not going anywhere. But in the small and surging Tahauku Bay, with its notorious reputation for bad holding, we figured that we should do some fix-it work. After a couple of tries, we seemed to strike the perfect balance between the two anchors.
Anchor crisis averted, Andy and I decided to venture ashore to the main village, Atuona. Looking at the map, the position of the dinghy dock seemed to be in the opposite direction of town. Again, we had limited guidebook resources, so we just decided to go for it.