Agakauitai: A Change of Scenery
Three days off the boat in the Gambier Islands, with a ridge hike, a hermit crab in a hibiscus flower, and a long quiet afternoon on a beach where the reef sharks ran the show.
The boat at anchor off Agakauitai, photographed from the beach as the day slipped sideways into the evening.
The plan came together the way these plans usually do, which is to say it sat on the back of a chart for a week and then turned into a real plan in about ten minutes. We had been at anchor in Rikitea long enough to know everyone's dinghy by the sound of the outboard, and a window of clear weather and steady easterlies finally lined up with our friends on SV Serengeti being ready to move. Agakauitai is barely a passage at all from Mangareva, just a short hop across the lagoon, but a change of bay can do for a boat what a change of light does for a photograph. By late morning we were tied up to a fresh patch of water, looking at a different ridge and a different angle on the sun.
The first day Ted and I went up the ridge. The path is the kind that exists mostly because goats keep insisting on it, and at the top there is enough wind to make the drone sound brave. We came across a newborn kid on the way up, barely twice the size of a rabbit and standing on its legs the way you stand on a paddleboard for the first time, with all the right intentions and not much idea. The mother watched from a rock a few feet up and made it clear we could keep walking. From the top we watched SV Oso ghost past in the channel below, then dropped back down through the ti plants and the hibiscus to the dinghy. The lobsters, when we looked for them on the way home, had other ideas.
