Respecting Paradise

Thoughts on voyaging responsibly

- ELLEN MASSEY LEONARD

You’ll find the stuff of dreams at Hanamoe-noa. The golden sand of its beach is so fine that your feet sink deep into the warm, soft grains. The turquoise water is so clear that you can see your boat’s shadow on the bottom thirty feet down. The patches of coral teem with brightly colored reef fish. Manta rays glide gracefully around the bay, scooping up krill in their wide filter mouths. Wooded hills rise gently from the beach, giving protection from the strong easterly trade winds to leave the bay tranquil and calm.

Hanamoenoa Bay, in the Marquesas Islands of French Polynesia, is the kind of place sailors fantasize about. It’s the kind of place that keeps up morale on the long ocean passage that’s required to reach these tropic isles. And it’s the kind of place that, once you find it actually exists, brings out first awe and then exuberant excitement.

Most cruisers who reach the Marquesas have heard the fables. We’ve all heard of the abundant tropical fruit, seemingly growing wild in these verdant, fertile islands. We’ve heard of the sailors before us being showered in hospitality, being loaded down with fruit and fish, welcomed almost as if they were family. Some of us have even received that hospitality ourselves on earlier voyages, many years ago. We’ve heard of, or experienced on earlier voyages, the empty anchorages where it’s just us and the wilderness, the untouched reefs alive with all kinds of fish to spear and eat.

Today just fables