February 16 – Lundi – Manihi

I’m in my hammock. Awake and fighting the urge to jump up for the fourth time to go stroll on the beach and peer in the shallow water of the pass, where the black of the night has allowed the invertebrate fauna to make its weird and wonderful entrance in the crystal clear water. But it is late, this is but the first night on the motu, and the sun will come up soon, so I try to allow the rustling of the palm trees around to lull me to sleep. They sound so much like the patter of rain though that I find myself repeatedly peering from under the rain fly, to find yet again the only cloud in the sky the pale haze of the Milky Way. Reassuring as the clear sky is, I’m still a bit nervous; a couple of nearby passing squalls earlier in the day remind me that my shelter is yet to be really rain tested. And a windy rain test in the dark of night is not really an appealing prospect.

As I said, this is my first night on Motu Moemoe (dream in Tahitian), one of the many small islands forming the atoll of Manihi where I arrived earlier in the day.

[Manihi from the air]

I am here responding to an invitation to stay a few days on this private motu owned by a professional French couple, he retired military and she in the legal profession. I made the contact a couple of years ago through SEA, which this year grew to this invitation I was in a fortunate position to accept. My hosts warn me that a house is only under construction, but since I pack a survival kit of a hammock, a mosquito net and a rain fly, I insist I can rough it on my own if need be. Beyond this I know very little of what I’m about to find as I step out of the Air Tahiti plane and claim my luggage from a small hut constituting the airport. I called my host three days earlier and understand there should be someone with a boat here to pick me up and drive me to the motu. Some 15 passengers disembark with me, and, all save a couple, head to the adjoining pier where they board a few 20-odd foot open boats that roar one after the other out to absurdly green waters of the lagoon. I am soon alone, so I stroll to the small concession hut at the pier and buy a cold beer. This in hand I settle in for a wait in a patch of shade under a coconut tree.

For the record, by the way, this is something you should not do. I heard someplace a statistic that there are more people killed by falling coconuts on the Pacific Islands than there are by lightning strikes. Alas, the coconut fails to command the same respect as a good lightning storm and it's pretty hot in the noonday sun, so I take my chances and stay put. Eventually the beer and my patience run out, and I place a call to my host who apologizes and coordinates another ride for me. A boat arrives, and as we pull away from the dock, I am very aware how much the water connects this place, more so than in Rangiroa where most of the people live on two large motus. Here, the motus are smaller and every one I see has a house or two on it making it appear more developed than Rangiroa (in reality there are only 700 or so people living here). We speed by many examples of the industry that has created this development pattern; Manihi was a major center of pearl production until a precipitous decline in the price of pearls around 2003. Many of the pearl farms, visible by processing huts built on stilted platforms on top of patch reefs inside the lagoon, are now abandoned with their buildings decaying in the humid salty air.

We reach the motu after a twenty-minute fierce, jarring boat ride (one of many that make me fear permanent kidney damage) and I disembark to be greeted by the motu’s three occupants. My host welcomes me in a convivial French manner, and I also meet an American contractor, formerly of San Diego but now an expat in Tahiti, and the Tahitian foreman of the construction crew. We take a whirlwind tour of the motu, and I pick a spot to stretch my hammock in the sole, small group of coconut trees on the island. Afterwards follows a cowboy-style dinner in the one existing small building serving as the canteen, lodgings and storage for the construction effort of the main house.

And so I find myself in the hammock, shortly after sunset, contemplating the coming five days. I really don’t have any contacts here in the fishing community, thus I don’t have many expectations about what I can accomplish with the project. See here’s the thing: so far I have been hosted by maohi, or Polynesian, people. This has given me instant access to the massive family networks and guaranteed equally instant acceptance in the community. Now I am a guest in the house (metaphorically speaking…) of a fraani (French) popaa (white), so I will have to put my social skills to real use and try to make these contacts in a short few days on my own. Because there is this other thing: the French expats tend to have very little to do with the maohi society unless they married into a maohi family. And I have already caught some glimpses of the fact that my host’s relationship with the community here is pretty much commercial. He buys goods and services from people, but that is about it. No real conflict or anything, don’t get me wrong, but I’m afraid that staying on this motu will, by association, paint me with the same brush in the eyes of the good people of Manihi.

I start my campaign by talking to Teva, the Tahitian foreman the next morning. He is up with the sun, as am I, and I have some time to talk with him over breakfast coffee before the others get up. My few halting words of Tahitian make a good impression, and we soon have a rapport. He promises to talk to someone in the building crew who also fishes for a living about an interview, a fishing expedition and further contacts. So far so good!

[Wading a pass]

Later in the day Kenny the contractor invites me to take a walk with him into town, and I readily accept; I think we both yearn for an opportunity to discourse in a truly common language. I take the walk to be a playful reference to a boat ride, but Kenny is good to his word: we are going to wade into town, which is some three miles distant. See there are some four small motus between us and the town, each separated by a break anywhere from some 100 meters to 500 meters wide and about thigh deep. And it is a peculiar, beautiful walk. The passes feature a swiftly flowing current from the ocean side into the lagoon, and wading across them is much like fording a river. But a warm, sunny and altogether very pleasant river with plenty of fish who scatter away from my approaching feet! We chat on the way, and Kenny paints an interesting picture of the expatriate life in Tahiti (that’s where he lives with his Tahitian wife and kids). As in many other places I’ve visited, the expat community tends to hang out together, and I’m getting the sense that Kenny is not really adapting to Tahiti. He has a whole lot of North American expectations about how the world ought to operate that he elected not to check at the airport, but is instead carrying around like extra baggage as a small but constant source of friction for him. He is a very nice open kind of a guy with an easy horsing-around sense of humor, and I feel free to tell him as much in the few days I’m there. The first day, though, I am a mere vessel as Kenny’s floodgates open and he speaks pretty much non-stop for the entire day.

In town I go check out the fishing fleet (only one potimarara and assorted small skiffs) and the pass for any spearfishing activity, but since this is Sunday the village is pretty deserted save some kids playing on the street. The place completely lacks the charm of Tiputa; most of the houses are new pre-fab types ringed by ugly cinderblock fences, giving this place a sort of army camp kind of a feel. Eventually, with some provisions in our backpacks, we manage to hitch a boat ride back to the motu.

The second night is much like the first. I get up a couple of times to admire the stars, the palm trees still sound like rain and overall the experience has a kind of dream-like quality to it. I spend the second day snorkeling and helping with the construction, and Teva talks to Terri in the construction crew who promises to take me fishing with him. He also says he can arrange an interview with the man in town who runs the only fish weir in operation in Manihi. I also look forward to wading over to the next motu to talk to the owner of the small family-operated pearl farm there. Though not strictly fishing, this form of aquaculture in a place like Manihi occupies such an important role in the island’s economy that I’m very interested to hear about it from a first-hand source.

[Giant clam]

In the mean time I’m getting ready for another night under the stars with some trepidation, as there have been more squalls around today. My rain fly and hammock survived just fine, but none the less I use some dried palm fronds to create a bit more wind and rain shelter by weaving them together and hanging them to help block the gap between the rain fly and the ground. In these squalls the rain can come down at a pretty good angle and this ought to help. We’ll see…

February 14 – Samedi – Tiputa, Rangiroa and Manihi

You hear this often: We can’t starve here. This claim refers to the condition of these islands where food really does seem to be for the taking in the form of fish, fruit and coconuts. You also hear the opposite interpretation, particularly of the Tuamotus, as a hostile place with scarce resources and poor water supplies. It is difficult to reconcile these two views in light of what I’ve seen traveling through the islands so far. Baguette, corned beef and rice being integral parts of the local diet, it is hard for a casual observer to filter out how the dinner table would look long-term without those staples.

Then again, changes in diet have accompanied huge changes in the social fabric of the Polynesian culture as well. By all accounts, village life was once much more a communal affair, and a large part of the getting of food was done together. In the Tuamotus this involved digging large pits down to the fresh (actually brackish) water table, to be filled with compost and used for communal gardens. But it was fishing that really expressed this cooperative nature of living of the Paumotu. The best example of this was the use of communally constructed and maintained fish weirs (or ahua huiraatira), of which there were one or two per village.

Notice the past tense. In interviews with the elder fishermen, the communal weirs vanished in the 60’s or 70’s, depending on the island and the village. The immediate reason seems to have been that the copra boats plying the waters between the islands and Papeete started buying fish as well, and the sharing of cash proved less easily done than sharing the fish. All this, by the way, coincided with the vast economic pressures brought to the archipelago by an army of technicians, administrators and soldiers involved in the French nuclear testing program in 1964.

Ok, so there are no more communal weirs in the Northern Tuamotus, but some private weirs still exist, and with Hérvé’s help I managed to visit one in the neighboring village of Avatoru. I should add that Hérvé’s family used to keep a weir right in the Tiputa pass, but it was destroyed some years ago by a storm. Hérvé shared with me an old family photo from the late 70’s showing family members tending the weir, and though much of the structure is still there, they have yet to put it back into service for reasons that are still not quite clear to me.

[Hérvé's family weir]

With all this playing in my head I find myself in an old, leaky, fiberglass skiff heading west from the village of Avatoru and across the pass. The pass itself is smaller than the one in Tiputa, but a motu on the lagoon side splits it into two channels, and we are headed to the farther channel and around the motu. Flying out of Rangiroa to Manihi today I managed to get a good picture out of the plane window: the motu is on the left and you can see the weir as a faint dark line in the shape of the letter N against the light reef (follow the edge of the channel from the motu up and torward the right).

Driving the boat is Punua who is, yes, another uncle of Hérvé’s. We are accompanied by another fisherman who works for the commune and who, given Hérvé’s position in the municipal council, has taken a council van to drive us to Avatoru. Before embarking on the boat, I interview Punua on camera at his house on the lagoon with Hérvé translating. During the interview Punua holds in the crook of a big arm a perfectly tranquil grandson who examines me intensely. I have a strong impulse to start trading expressions with him. Since this would completely blow my cover as a serious investigator, I stifle the urge and keep my face in the viewfinder.

Back in the boat, the drive is a short 10-minute affair in the pass. The current is flowing out, and the old outboard is making a loud racket inching us along the edge of the swiftly moving water. Our destination appears as a collection of poles sticking out of the water on the edge of the pass in what I estimate to be about 2.5 meters of water. We slide along the aggregation, and what from the distance looked like a pretty random gathering now resolves into three organized rows of poles. We tie up to four of them, Punua and I don masks, and I follow him in the water outside the weir. He scoots inside the enclosure over chicken wire tied to 5cm metal poles forming the frame of the structure. Inside there are fish. Oh my, are there fish. A huge school of ature (a small jack) swims in a lazy circle in the inner chamber of the weir with a couple of stingrays and a large green moray getting fatter by the minute. As the curtain of fish splits here and there, I catch glimpses of small sharks, triggerfish, trevally and goodness knows what else!

Yes, you could feed a village this way! And the weir is not just a way to catch fish, but also a way to keep them really, really fresh for a long time. Just go to the ahua and collect what you need for the day and then come back the next day for some more. Ok, so it is not quite as simple as that, there is strong seasonality among the most abundant species like ature and oeo, but Punua tells me he gets a mix of different species in smaller numbers all through the year.




The weir incorporates two large chambers shaped like inverted V’s, aimed at the pass. At the apex of each V is an enclosure that opens to the main chamber via a mesh funnel with an opening some 50 cm in diameter. It is this funnel that allows the fish in, but poses too large a puzzle for them to figure out how to use it as an exit. And here they are, providing a steady flow of fish for Punua’s roadside fish stand, as well as local schools and restaurants.

So there it is staring one in the face: the irony of our modern condition. Is it preferable to go to work for money with which to buy fish or to not work (so much) and just go get your own fish? Or work with your neighbors to secure fish for all, as the weir does represent an investment in material and labor that is too big for any individual or small family unit. Contemplating such things, it is difficult to steer away from notions of South Seas idyllic village life, of a life with few cares and simple pleasures. Funny enough, reading through the works of Kenneth Emory and Frank Stimson, two ethnographers who traveled extensively through the Tuamotus in the 1920’s and 30’s, this is an image that emerges. Both gents, employed by the Bishop Museum of Honolulu, at times went completely native replete with their own houses and wahines and stayed on islands for months at a time.

It also difficult not to worry about the future of these islands. Though families and communities are still very important in the Tuamotu life, an intensifying cash economy brings with it the pressure to exploit marine resources. Earlier, I visited an enclosure where poisson sale, or salt fish, is being dried for market. The species used for salting is the oeo, a species of snapper that, during the new moons in November through February, is fished in large numbers by jigging in the lagoon. I interviewed two of the five fishermen who run the salt fish business and obtained a rough estimate of some seven to ten tons of salted, dried oeo being shipped to Tahiti every year in those four months. The salt fish business goes back at least to the 1940’s, but today there are more people involved and the fishermen complain of a dearth of fish.



Swimming in the weir, though, abundance is really the only fitting image. I reluctantly follow Punua over the mesh and back into the boat. In the distance there are the remains of many other weirs, disused and in disrepair for reasons that, despite my questioning, still remain somewhat of a mystery. The Paumotu have a reputation in Tahiti as being lazy, not wanting to do much for tomorrow today. If there is something to that reputation, it is hard for me to sit in judgment. I suppose you can go and fish intensively for a few days, freeze the catch and eat frozen fish for a few weeks – and pay for a freezer and expensive electricity. Or you can go get your fish fresh by extending some effort every day. Which way would you pick?




With these thoughts I get ready to leave Rangiroa. I will miss this place, the village of Tiputa and Hérvé and his family in particular. I’ve eaten many meals at his parents outdoor dining table, paddled a va’a (outrigger canoe) with his brother Mamia, drank some beers with his pals at the local magazin – I have had a fantastic time here and am loath to leave. Hérvé departs on a flight after mine for Papeete, and his father drives us to the airport in his 15’ aluminum skiff. We say our reluctant goodbyes at the airport, but I know I’ll be back here before long! Thank you, my friend!

February 10 – Mardi – Tiputa, Rangiroa

It has been a busy and productive three days! Hérvé and I are getting along famously, his house is a very comfortable place and I’m rather smitten with the village of Tiputa. There is a school in the village that serves the northern Tuamotu region, which means there are a lot of young people around. Right around the corner from the Mairie (municipal offices) and next to the school is the sports center, a roofed structure used for volleyball and footsal. For the uninitiated, footsal is a variant of soccer adapted for indoor play on smaller fields and with five players, popular enough around the world to have its own world cup. The local league is busy and I go watch a couple of highly entertaining games. There are stands, and these games are definitely events in Tiputa, complete with outdoor concession offerings and vocal audience participation.

I am getting the hang of spear fishing - we’ve been going out every day since I got here. Or so I though before today, before Hérvé announced we were going to fish the incoming current right at the mouth of the pass. Now, he didn’t mean the peak current but the period of slack water between the tides and the hour immediately following it – this gives me some comfort and indicates he is not totally crazy, as the lagoon of Rangiroa is huge and not a place I want to get swept out to either. Ok, so I’m willing to try, as this is something that is completely normal to these folks (ie. return from fishing is expected as a matter of course), and I don’t want to appear a complete wuss.




We go to the entry spot well ahead of time, as he wants to introduce me to his uncle and a friend, both by his description fishermen and artisans. I am curious, and get even more so as we approach a low thatched hut overlooking the mouth of the pass. Emanating from within is the sound of a duet between a didgeridoo and a nose flute, and as we duck in to the hut my eyes take in the sight of this magnificent rasta guy sitting on a low stool by a pile of woodchips blowing into his didgeridoo. The sound of the nose flute comes from another corner where another sagely looking man is totally engrossed in producing the notes. Eventually they notice us and a round of welcomes ensues. My few words of Tahitian create a favorable impression, and with Hérvé’s help I tell them about myself. They respond with an invitation to join them the next day for some fishing with a net right in front of the hut. It appears that the lunar cycle is right for fishing for a certain kind of parrotfish on the shallow reef and that these gentlemen are the only ones using a net on the shallow reef in Tiputa at the present. I am grateful for the opportunity.

At this point I should probably explain a bit about the terrain. The crest of the reef on the seaward side rings the island some 50-100 meters distant. Between the shallow crest (out of the water during low tide) and the island is a very shallow back reef environment that is a distinct habitat from the steep slope of the fore reef. Only about a meter or so deep, the back reef receives a continuous and massive flow of water from the swell that breaks over the reef crest and spills landward. This water must go someplace, and those places are mostly the shallow breaks between the motus. At the pass, the reef crest rounds the corners of the islands forming the pass and runs for a bit toward the center of the atoll, parallel to the pass. At about a third of the way in the reef closes in with the island, and at this point all the water piling in due to the surf up front spills into the pass. It is this back reef environment as it curves into the pass that we’ll fish tomorrow. Today Hérvé and I are going to fish the outer edge of the reef.


Ok, so I’m a bit nervous as we enter the water. Hérvé guides our progress across the back reef to the edge where several things are happening. Though we are a bit inside the pass, some of the surf still gets in and you don’t really want to be surprised by it. Another thing is that the back reef water is starting to spill into the pass. And then there is the fact that we are standing at the edge of the vertical fore reef slope. Hérvé pauses here in the waist-deep water, observes the current for some 5 minutes while I hang on as the occasional swell breaks around us. He pronounces things to be OK, we quickly pull on our fins and masks and fall forward into the blue.





If you have ever observed a front loading washing machine in action and wondered how it would feel to be inside – well I’ve got some insight. The water pouring into the pass from the back reef makes it necessary to keep swimming toward the reef crest. Get too close, and the occasional swell picks you up for a frothy ride right to the top of the reef crest. There are a lot of small air bubbles continually churned in at the top limiting visibility, so I keep losing sight of Hérvé. Eventually I figure it out, and just try to stay below the surface where the incoming ocean water is completely clear and the visibility is great. I am towing the tub, and since this is the sharkiest of the places in the pass, try to stick as close as I can to Hérvé to minimize his need to swim around with bleeding, speared fish.



He does his usual – with minimum fuss glides gracefully down the steep edge, peeks around the ledges, lies on top of them in wait. And, needless to say, brings home the bacon. Paihere, Tapatai, Naenae and Honae (different species of Jacks) start piling into the box, and eventually I manage to relax and get busy with my camera. The visibility is phenomenal, and I follow Hérvé as far down as I can. There are fish aplenty here. I’m attracted to large schools of Manini and Aupapa that seem rather indifferent to my presence. It is not a great place for photography, though, as keeping station without a lot of swimming is impossible, and swimming makes the camera move a lot. So eventually I just observe, observe Hérvé spear and the almost magical appearance of the sharks in the immediate aftermath. Today the only loss is to a very aggressive and large Oiri (Triggerfish) that manages to take three big bites out of the back of a large Tapatai as Hérvé surfaces towing it behind him at a shark-safe distance.


After an hour or so we head back toward our launching spot. However, conditions have changed with the speeding current and we have to let it carry us some 300 meters further down the pass to get out of the water. Not a problem, as Hérvé guides to his sister’s house on the water where we clean the fish and ourselves. He also demonstrates an interesting technique in fish cleaning on couple of small Naenae: first you gut the fish, then pull the skin off. After skinning, make a number of cuts (to the bone) both laterally and vertically on both sides. What is created is a fish ready for some lime juice, a bit of salt and perhaps some miti ha’arii (coconut milk) for a quick poisson cru on the run. Good stuff, too! At this point the afternoon has progressed to around 4:00 and we walk (ok, I stagger…) back to Hérvé’s house. All the young guys I see around are remarkably fit, and I am developing a keen understanding of exactly why this is. I’m looking forward to tomorrow and perhaps a bit more passive perch from which to observe the proceedings.

So what is this place anyway?

OK, the plan is this. For the next three weeks I will be on board the Robert C. Seamans, involved in a couple of short collaborative programs we are doing here this year – more about those later. On or about January 27, I’ll leave the ship and start the fisheries project in earnest, but I thought I would use these first three weeks writing about topics that will give you a taste of what this place is about.

A Tahitian friend, Keitapu Maamaatuaiahutapu, whom I met on my first trip here, is helping me in my planning and practical arrangements in a very substantial way. He is a Ph.D. oceanographer as well, and has divided his time in the past four years between academia and politics – he is a professor at the University of French Polynesia and has served multiple times as the Minister of fisheries and marine resources. But beyond that he is an avid fisherman himself, and indeed a big part of the inspiration for my project here.

This much I know about my coming itinerary: I will visit five different islands in five different parts of this archipelago. Right, but perhaps I should acquaint you with the basics of the geography of these islands before going any further.

There are some nice reproductions of the map of French Polynesia overlaid with that of Europe. They cover roughly the same area, which gives you some idea how big this place really is in terms of distances (landmass, though, adds up to less than one Delaware). It consists of five major groups: the Marqueasas, the Tuamotus, the Gambier Islands, the Austral Islands and the Society Islands. The Society Islands further fall into the Windward and the Leeward groups, Tahiti and Moorea being the major Windward Islands.

What makes all these islands collectively the French Polynesia is an accident of the history of European colonial expansion. Let's just say that when the dust settled, France was left with lots of little islands while the Brits took the big places. Take out the word French, and you are left wondering what exactly is the Polynesia part about. It is a term that really reflects the struggle of the early European explorers from Cook on to understand the connections they perceived between the widely spaced islands in the western and central Pacific.

Indeed the connections are many among these islands. They were populated by the Polynesian Migration, a movement of people that started from around New Guinea and Indonesia some 3,000 years ago and reached the central Pacific islands sometime before 500 AD. The languages spoken are of the same language group, their mythologies are similar, as are early building methods. For all the similarities, though, there are some significant differences as well. I think it might be useful to think of the term Polynesian in the way one thinks of the term European – sharing many things certainly, but you wouldn’t want to suggest to a Frenchman that they are really just the same deal as Italians.

So there it is. A Tahitian and a Paumotu (someone from the Tuamotus) speak languages that are not readily mutually intelligible and think about the world in slightly different ways. And so I will now start using the word Polynesian a bit less and instead will refer to the islands themselves. And given that I am right now in Tahiti, I’ll start with mostly talking about Tahiti and the Tahitians.

Next up, some observations about Papeete.