Days 234 - 252 of our five-year circumnavigation (July 23 - August 12, 2026)
401 nautical miles sailed among these islands
8,631 cumulative nautical miles sailed since leaving California on December 3, 2025
Reaching Bora Bora - the island everyone’s heard of - felt like an achievement!
On July 23 we left Taha’a and Raiatea, exited the pass, and headed for Bora Bora. The sail was a short hop of about 20 miles with a fair wind and a following sea. A broad reach got us there in a little over three hours.
Bora Bora was by far our favorite island so far - at that point. Maybe still! It was amazing. The only downside is that it was so expensive - but the kind of expensive that’s worth it.
Meghan felt this more strongly than I conveyed in my first draft of this log entry, and she was right. This was the first place since we left the United States that felt truly luxurious. Unapologetically civilized! In most other places, "town" has meant a village with one little store, or a dock with a bakery and somewhere to fill a jerry can with diesel. Bora Bora was built, on purpose, for people who expect a cocktail menu, a sunset deck, a dress shop, and a lagoon that looks like the brochure. Most of cruising is a lot grittier than the photos - muddy dinghies, scrubbing the waterline, cans of tuna in a quiet anchorage. Bora Bora is what people picture when they picture this life. In Bora Bora, the picture matches the reality.
The overwater bungalow that was actually our boat
We were moored at Toopua, in Tehou Bay, very close to The Conrad Hotel overwater bungalows that cost five thousand to twelve thousand dollars a night. You can't anchor there. You have to pick up a mooring, and someone comes around in a boat and collects the money. It's not a lot of money - I think it was fifty dollars a day. So we were paying fifty bucks a night, and anyone in those bungalows was paying five to twelve THOUSAND!
Meghan said it best: "Our boat is our overwater bungalow." For 1% of the cost of the one on land. (Please just stop there and don’t do the math on the full amortized cost of buying and sailing the boat!!)
Even just sitting on the boat was great. The air smelled better. It smelled green and fresh, almost like the mist drifting across the mountains had its own scent. We were parked right in the middle of somebody else’s luxury vacation, and it still felt like ours. :-)
The lagoon is why this place is world famous, and it earns it. Pristine, enormous, crystal clear, and honestly I’m having trouble thinking of enough superlatives to do it justice, so just watch the video below. It's the best lagoon we've seen anywhere. THE proverbial South Pacific paradise - which is why it’s priced that way.
The weather was perfect, and the water was so clear and inviting that we used the pool every day. "The pool" is our inflatable raft from Further Customs (the same one from Avea Bay), with a mesh center so you can sit in the water and still lounge in the sun. We'd soak, recline, set a drink in the cup holder and call it a day!
One particularly notable spot was only five hundred feet from our mooring. The water was about chest deep, and you could get in, walk around, and be surrounded by blacktip sharks and southern stingrays! That was really fun, but Meghan felt safer sitting in the dinghy - at first. She really wanted to go in, but… sharks, y’know? We took three different trips to that spot before she got up the courage to jump in and do it. I’m so proud she overcame her fears!
Meals, docks, and an anniversary
We had really good meals. REALLY good. It was also just nice to be among other tourists, in a high-end place, on purpose. After months where we cruisers were the only outsiders in a bay, that felt like a small vacation inside the bigger one.
We went to the Bora Bora Yacht Club numerous times. It's a great little spot with a handy dinghy dock where it’s easy to tie up. We loved the vibe there because it was mostly cruisers, so there was always someone on the dock to catch a line or lend a hand while stepping out. It was also the first good steak I had anywhere in the South Pacific. Meghan loves the fish I catch, but truth be told, I prefer to eat things that walk over things that swim. So a delicious juicy steak put me into a contented coma.
Restaurant St. James was a real delight, and the best example of what Meghan meant about Bora Bora feeling civilized. You arrive by dinghy, the same way the bungalow guests arrive in the fancy hotel launches, and tie up at their dock. Then you're up on a deck with a cocktail menu. Hand-crafted cocktails. And a wine list!!! It was the first happy hour we'd been to since leaving the States that actually had a cocktail menu. We sat there with an ice-cold drink in hand, watching the sunset and the boats sailing by. Ahhhh….
We ended up at happy hour with other westerners who were there on a regular land-based vacation, and they were fascinated by our life. Fair enough! We were pretty intrigued by theirs, too - showers that don't depend on a watermaker, and a hotel room that somebody else cleans! For an hour, we were all just people on a deck at sunset.
We discovered the Bora Bora Beach Club by accident, and we ended up going three times - first for a drink, then for lunch, and the third time for the beach and a swim. It was a 20-minute dinghy ride around the southern tip, dodging bommies (coral heads) and zooming across miles of shallow water. So fun! We dropped the dinghy anchor in about nine inches of water and let it drift while we went ashore. No dock fees, no fuss - just peak cruiser living!
The finest restaurant of the stay was La Villa Mahana - a small French restaurant in Vaitape with only eight tables. It's often described as “one of the most exclusive and romantic restaurants in the world.” It's run by Corsican chef Damien Rinaldi-Dovio and his wife Vaihere out of a converted private home, with only one seating a night. It books out well ahead and we were lucky to get a reservation. It was on a Tuesday, naturally! :-)
We celebrated our eighth anniversary there. It was a wonderful night to celebrate our relationship and the fact that I found a woman who loves me enough - and is crazy enough - to come live this ridiculous adventure with me. The meal was off the chart. It was expensive, yes, but it was a French Laundry level experience for 70% less. It was the rare splurge that did not include a side of regret.
Shopping, in a good way
Bora Bora was also the first place with a real shopping scene, and Meghan loved this part as much as the lagoon! There was a dress shop that inspired her, pearl and jewelry shops, and a handicraft market right at the dock. Touristy, but in a good way.
She didn’t buy anything - and she doesn't need to. Shopping, fashion, and color deeply inspire her. She’s a designer, very visual, and a total maximalist. Sometimes she just soaks up all the color and beauty, and that's the whole point of the trip.
Picnic day, and the rainy lap home
Meghan packed a picnic and we took the dinghy to a sandy beach on Motu Piti A’au (a "motu" is a small island on the reef), across the bay behind the Beach Club.
While we were over that way, we checked out the mooring field at Motu Fareone. It's one of the largest, and it's beautiful, and we'd talked about moving Some Tuesday over there. Up close, it was packed, busy and full of charter boats. Our spot at Toopua was better, and not worth motoring her all the way around the island to trade it. So we stayed put.
After the picnic, we kept going all the way around the north side of the island, inside the lagoon. As we came through Vairupe, it started to rain. By that time we were still over a nautical mile from the Bora Bora Yacht Club, and it was pouring. The original plan was to head back to the boat, but she was over three miles away. A drink at the Yacht Club seemed like a MUCH better idea!
I asked Meghan to choose: slower, smoother, and wetter, or faster, bumpier, and dryer. She chose the latter. I slammed the throttle on our 40-horse Yamaha wide open, and we beat the rest of the rain to the dock!
Manta rays
There's a manta feeding station just around the northern tip of the closest island, and it did not disappoint. Meghan, who enjoys being my dive valet, drove me there in the dinghy, and we dropped the anchor a short swim away. I jumped in and joined about a dozen other snorkelers who were there on hired tours. I didn’t see anything! Luckily, the tours were near the end of their time and packed up and left. I had the place to myself.
I floated peacefully on the surface, keeping as quiet as I could and regulating my breathing through the snorkel - as zen-like as possible. And soon enough, there he was. A gorgeous manta gliding around about 12 feet below me, filtering food from the rich water. I frog-kicked very carefully, keeping my fins below the surface so I wouldn't make any noise. I could have stayed with him all day! He either didn't know or didn't care that I was there, and I got quite a show. The video here is worth your time.
The visa clock
Our visa allowed us to stay in French Polynesia for ninety days, from May 1 until July 31.
We checked out from Bora Bora on July 30, planning to leave on the 31st. Then the weather was not good for sailing. Or at least that’s the excuse we told ourselves since we were enjoying Bora Bora so much <wink>. So we “waited for better conditions” and finally left Bora Bora on August 2. Even then we went to another French Polynesian island, so….
We'd officially checked out of the country - we just hadn't actually left it yet! More on that below. :-)
Maupiha’a
From Bora Bora we sailed to Maupiha’a - also called Mopelia - just one overnight, arriving the next afternoon. It's super remote. There's no ferry, and no supply boat on any useful schedule. The few people who live there get by on what they can catch and what cruisers bring them. The population at the time we visited: 2.
The pass going in is very narrow and difficult, and it's not well marked. After bad weather, waves wash over the reef and overfill the lagoon, and all that water drains back out through the pass as an ebb that never quite ends. Luckily, I'd be motoring against the current going in, and Some Tuesday’s diesels easily overpower it. The passage back out would have a bit more hair on it.
Once we got in, we anchored at the north end for a few days. Then a high pressure system brought higher winds, veering to the south (shifting clockwise, from the east around toward the south). We originally thought we would stay put. There were probably a dozen boats in the northern anchorage, and all of them went to seek shelter in the south anchorage. Pretty soon we were the only one left! So we capitulated and moved south, and I am glad we did. We ended up with about a week of 25-30 knot winds, but we were now hidden close behind a large motu on the southeast corner of the atoll. It would have been very choppy on the north side because of the long fetch (the stretch of open water the wind blows across, building up waves). We stayed longer than we really wanted to, and spent most of that extra week on the boat.
Shell Paradise
From the north anchorage we took the dinghy over to the other side of the island, to a remote stretch of the atoll strewn with coral. Meghan named it Shell Paradise because it was so raw and untouched. Gift-shop-quality shells were just lying on the ground, in unlimited supply.
As we walked around, little baby blacktip sharks were swimming in the shallow pools, and you could wade right in with them! At one point, Meghan looked ahead and said, "Is that a basketball?" I thought, no way, it can't possibly be a basketball - maybe a pearl float. But when we walked up on it, sure enough, it was a random, sun-worn basketball that had washed ashore from goodness knows where. Probably some other yacht. Wilson!! (Yeah, yeah, I know Wilson was a volleyball - just roll with me, ok?)
The cruiser community keeps a shared Google Doc for Maupiha’a. If you're going, you can look up what the residents need - gasoline, notebooks for school, seeds, peanut butter, rechargeable batteries, toys. Cruisers are constantly bringing little gifts that help keep them provisioned, because there's no other way to get things. Sadly, we didn’t know about this before we left Bora Bora, so we couldn’t contribute. It's an amazingly raw way to live.
The only people out there when we visited were a mother, Faimano, and her four-year-old son, Tehau.
Bora Bora had cocktail menus and dress shops. Maupiha’a had two people and a Google Doc. Both of them are French Polynesia. Both are sublime. We needed the second one to remember what makes the first one so pleasurable.
Illegal aliens, briefly
We had checked out of French Polynesia on July 30, but we didn't actually leave the country until August 12, when we worked our way out through the Maupiha’a pass and pointed Some Tuesday west.
So for about two weeks, we were illegal aliens in French Polynesia - checked out, still here, eating well and waiting on weather! It's a good line for the log, and it is also (kind of) the truth.
With the weather clear, we motored through that same narrow pass just before 8 a.m. The current caught the stern and shoved it sideways, making us yaw (swing off course), just to remind us the ocean is always the boss. But we made it out easily enough. Two-and-a-half days of sailing later we would motor through another narrow, poorly marked pass into Aitutaki - the first stop after French Polynesia that actually felt like a reset.
The journey continues….