The Atoll of Manihi

We arrived yesterday morning and following local advice, waited for 2 hours after low tide before coming in the entrance. We had an easy passage with no current and no problems. The entrance is well marked and you line up centre channel and head directly for the north cardinal mark inside the atoll. As you get to the mark, you jog left a bit and pass it on you right hand side. There is a marked channel that goes counter clockwise inside the atoll that takes you past the village and on to other more sheltered anchorages. We anchored about 1 mile from the village in the "east" anchorage. There were 4 other boats here but anchoring is easy as you really don't swing due to prevailing wind. The only issue is getting the anchor back up. There are a lot of corral heads and most boats have had issues with their anchor chain getting caught on the corral. I have yet to dive the anchor to see what we look like but will deal with that later today. Shortly after we arrived, Fernando, the baker (among MANY other things) came by with fresh baguettes. After a comfortable 4 day passage, it was pretty nice to find fresh bread waiting for us on arrival. Our NZ friends on Solace are here and invited us over for a cold drink mid-morning and let us in on all the goings on here. Fernando has a pearl farm and offers tours to visitors, he also hosts a pig roast once a week or so if there are enough boats here. He has his finger in a lot of different things in the atoll. When we got the bread, he asked if we would be interested in a tour of his families pearl farm that afternoon. We said sure, why not. It was 2000 CFP per person, so not too expensive. He came and picked us up around 14:00 and along with 3 other couples made our way out to his farm. He then proceeded to show us in detail how you farm oysters and seed them to get pearls. It is a fascinating operation that takes 24-27 months to grow the oyster to maturity and get the first pearl. It is well worth the visit as the process is fascinating and very labour intensive. His family has a concession hat has 600 buoys to support a line that where the oysters grow. Suspended from the line are recycled plastic bundles about half a meter long that the baby oysters find their way to. At the beginning they are only half a millimetre long! This line is suspended 10 to 15 meters deep. Any deeper and they loose too many oysters to predators. After 8/9 months, they harvest the small oysters which are 3-5 centimetres across and then suspend them in a more captive environment. Once they get large enough (about 15 months in) they are again taken out of the water and they seed the oyster to get it to generate the pearl. The process is extraordinary. First they find an oyster that has good colour and remove a small piece of muscle from it. After careful trimming, essentially a surgical operation, they then open each oyster a crack and carefully insert a seed and a piece of muscle in the egg sac. This grafting is amazing to see. When they are working they can do one oyster every 15 seconds or so. The seed they use is made from Abalone from Mississippi in the US. They come in different sizes and the grafter (in this case Estrella, Fernandos wife), chooses the appropriate size for the particular oyster. The grafted oysters are then re-strung and left in the water for 12 months then the first harvest begins. Again they wedge open each oyster and remove the pearl and as long as the sac is unbroken, they will re-seed it with another Abalone seed. They can do this up to 3 times and each subsequent pearl is larger. Typically they get 12-15 pearls from 20 oysters. After the first harvest, they can re-seed about 85% of the oysters. The whole operation is family run and they have it set up so that they are continually harvesting. It was a great afternoon and I got a whole of practice in French as I spent most of the time translating for the others. It was kind of fun! At the end of it all, Fernando informed us that we would each be given one oyster and if luck had it, we would get a pearl. I got mine opened first and found a tiny natural white pearl. Cathy's had none and Jim off of anther Canadian boat called (appropriately enough) Prairie Oyster, also cam up blank. OK, that's they way it works, no one was disappointed but Fernando pulled out three more oysters and Jim and Cathy both got pearls then he handed one to me and lo and behold I got a really nice blue/green pearl (the tiny white one I got was pretty small after all). The afternoon is best experience we have had since getting to the south pacific and I highly recommend it.

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