Dear family:

Leonard. thanks for remind us that three years have passed since Bitty Don's death. My last memories of Don are still crystal clear. He and Erik had passed by our house for a visit on a sunny afternoon, and Don, as usual, started teasing the kids, who, as usual, kept coming back for more. They simply adored him. (Rachaei has two pictures of Don in her cabin — both from Gold Lake.) My recollection is that we hadn't seen Don for a while, and I was struck by how big, strong, and manly he looked -- and acted. He seemed to be emerging from his childhood before our very eyes. After a short while he and Erik were off, but not before a kiss for Caren and a hug for me. I remember thinking -- and probably mentioning to Caren - what great kids they were, and how lucky we and the kids were to be living so close to them.

Many apologies for not writing sooner. It isn't as if I have slipped into Island Time; on the contrary, life has been more hectic than ever. Lots of stuff happening, lots of boat things breaking, lots of personnel problems surfacing, lots of stuff, in summary, that has kept me from the pleasure of writing my own family.

Inger, I have lost your email address — could you please send it to me, so I can write you directly? Thanks.

I write this email from just off the "blue lagoon," a lovely collection of motus (small islands) on the west side of Rangiroa atoll. We sailed here yesterday with another boat from the east side of Rangiroa. The other boat returned the same day. and we decided to spend the night. Why? Well, the sharks are the main draw. Yesterday Caren and I swam from the boat to the closest reef. On the way we spotted several pretty big sharks checking us out. "Pretty big" in our book means "bigger than you are." When we reached the reef, we stood in about two feet of water, where the bigger sharks couldn't fit. The smaller ones (4-5 feet long) could, however, and we found ourselves surrounded by about a dozen or so, all circling us counterclockwise, at a distance of about 10 feet. Kind of gets the juices flowing.

We entered Rangiroa atoll for the first time about 4 days ago, after visiting two other Tuamotan atolls, Ahe and Manihi. Rangiroa is the principle island of the Tuoamotus, which number 78, all but two of them coral atolls. They lie spread across 15 degrees of longitude, and extend almost 1,000 miles in a NW-SE direction. Together with the Marquises (north of us), the Australs (south of us), the Gambiers (southeast of use), and the Society islands (which include the better-known islands of Tahiti and Bora-Bora), they form French Polynesia, and are administered from Tahiti.

A good hunk of the Tuamotus and most of the Gambiers are off limits to pleasure craft — the French use this restricted zone for nuclear tests, specifically at Mururoa atoll. The French have earned the eternal enmity of all South Sea islanders for their total disregard of the wishes (and safety) of the Tuamotans in the restricted zone. It is the most common topic of conversation with the locals, and the best way to start a friendship is to announce that you are not French.

The Tuamotus have been called the "Dangerous Archipelago" because they lie so low, often extending just a few feet above sea level. It was not so long ago that most cruising plans aimed at only sighting and passing the Tuoamotus safely. Today a few atolls are regularly visited, thanks to the advent of GPS navigation. We have two GPS devices aboard, which locate us with an accuracy of a few hundred feet anywhere on earth -- without them, we probably would have skipped the entire archipelago.

Once you locate an atoll, however, you are only halfway there. The next problem is getting inside it via one or more channels in its fringing reef. Some of the atolls have no channels at all, or channels that are too shallow for yachts, or channels that are too narrow. Those that have good-sized, deep channels typically have very strong tidal currents, up to 8 knots in some cases. So you use your GPS to find the atoll and its entry channel, your radar to verify that it is really there (especially at night), and your sonar to check that there is adequate clearance under your boat. You hang around until the tide is slack, and then you motor on inside. Hey, the fun is just beginning, for the lagoon you just entered is typically full of coral heads that are just below the surface, and that you must detour around. How to spot the coral heads? Have somebody climb the mast to the first set of spreaders and look ahead, shouting out when to turn to port or starboard (of course, the sun should be behind you, but not too low in the sky, for the lookout to be effective). You also should have someone monitoring water depths with the boat's sonar. Relaxing, it ain't. The best part? When you do drop anchor, there is a good chance that it will get stuck in some coral at the bottom of the lagoon, in which case you get to dive down and free it when you are ready to leave.

What is there to do on a coral atoll, you may ask? Well, most of the fun is below water, for the Tuamotus have some of the clearest waters and most prolific fish and coral life on earth. The biggest rush is to dinghy over to the channel when the tide is just beginning to flood, put on your mask and snorkel, and float through the channel and into the lagoon, letting the tide do all the work. Rangiroa's Passe de Tiputa is one of the better channels for this activity -- it is wide, deep, and its underwater inhabitants have become conditioned to the sight of humans floating above them (and below them scuba divers float through the pass at varying depths). Sometimes you get visited by dolphins, sometimes by manta rays, and always by sharks ("considered harmless" by the locals). We did a drift snorkel at Manihi (two atolls northeast of here) a few days ago that swept us right up against a fish trap. We clung to the wire netting of the trap and peered in -- among the many fish were about twenty sharks of some 5 or so different species, which we stared at, eyeball to eyeball.

Some Tuamotans make a living out of cultivating and selling black pearls. We befriended some guys at Manihi who were pearl cultivators. They showed us the steps involved in implanting the "seed" in the mantle of the oyster, fastening it to a rope, and lowering it into the lagoon. (In the old days they used to dive for natural black pearls, but those are long since gone.) Twelve months later (if you are lucky) out pops a nice, black pearl, worth anywhere from $5 to $10,000 in the world market, depending on size, color, luster, and the world market (Japan and Korea are beginning to cultivate their own black pearls). Rachael batted her eyelashes and good a bagful of "rejects"; I purchased two nice big ones for $100, to be made into earrings for Caren for our fifteenth wedding anniversary (celebrated two months ago).

Since I began this email the wind picked up, and we decided to seek a quieter anchorage. We have just finished motoring about 3 hours along the Southwest edge of the lagoon, and are now anchored off motu AiAi, a tiny islet a few hundred yards inside the fringing reef. The water here is the clearest we have encountered, the anchorage is safe, the wind is down, and we are totally alone — we may hang here for a while. We hope to slowly encircle the lagoon over the next several days, then out the pass we came in on, and on to Tahiti (Rangiroa has a circumference of about 100 miles, and is the largest atoll in the world). We will be in Papeete for several weeks for necessary repairs and reprovisioning.

Sorry we missed Gold Lake this year it is still our kids' favorite vacation. We are all excited about Heather's marriage in September. Glad to hear Erik and Susan are back to work. Did you know that the ancient  Marquesan society had no lawyers?

Love to all,

Sammy and the gang