After studying images shot from low orbit (in which the island mimics a turquoise eye) or a modern navigation chart, one might cast Ra’ivavae into the dustbin of unsurfability, of mediocrity, of geologic immaturity, joining a myriad of surf-compromised islands, atolls, and reefs throughout Oceania. It would be a fair assumption, based on bathymetry and reef structures and the lack of clean, tapered passes, that to surf Ra’ivavae is to chase an enigma.
After examining the mythopoeic west reef of Passe Teavarua through my binoculars (nothing like the famous Cloudbreak of Tavarua), I could not imagine how the setup could possibly be, per hearsay, “one of the best waves in French Polynesia,” especially considering its numerous reef hazards that, at low tide, ruin the middle of the lineup. My pension sat on Ra’ivavae’s southwest coast, and as the wind was torquing hard from the east/southeast, my eyes wandered northwest to Motu Tuitui, a speck of green a mile out from Ra’irua Harbor. It was close enough, I decided, that I could ride a bicycle to Ra’irua and paddle from the rock-strewn shore below the gendarmerie (cop shop).
Tuitui had been surfed. I read the following entry on a blog, dated September 2018, written by a woman named Larissa, who chronicled various legs sailed by the S/V Roam, a catamaran captained by her husband, Mick, out of Tasmania:
“We found a wave on the reef outside the main pass, west of the small motu in front of the main anchorage. The wave breaks on the reef, is fast, inconsistent, and a little challenging. Nevertheless it was a wave and Mick, who hadn’t had a surf in about a month, was happy to get some wax under his feet.”
Ra’ivavae is an axiomatic kiter’s haven and Tuitui, “the small motu,” is where Tahitian-based photographer Ben Thouard had shot Ian Walsh surfing and foiling just a few months before the S/V Roam’s visit. On a bright Monday morning in Pape’ete, a few hours before I was to fly to Ra’ivavae, Thouard was out addressing some official business, but prior to, he swung by my place.
We went for coffee at an Italian joint in Marina Taina. Outside, sipping hot espresso, I asked him about his two journeys to Ra’ivavae, 440-miles southeast. The first trip occurred in 2014, when he was one of a 30-person television crew aboard the 228-foot Tahiti Nui, from which he was able to see six of the seven Austral Islands: Maria, Rimatara, Rurutu, Tubuai, Ra’ivavae, Rapa Iti, and Marotiri. His second trip, in 2018, was a brief, low-key reconnaissance with Walsh.
“We weren’t hunting for epic surf photos,” Thouard told me. “Ian had a travel budget to go and look for potential big-wave spots. He was not interested in anything normal-sized. Because the Australs are really exposed to south swells, the smallest we saw the waves was six-foot Hawaiian. On the same swell, we looked at Ra’ivavae and Tubuai. Ian was searching for something that was maybe 15- or 20-foot Hawaiian. It’s pretty raw down there.”
Thouard assured me that it would be easy to find a Ra’ivavaean or two who would be keen to take me to the reef. Whether they would remain out there while I surfed? Well…
“They are happy to share some moments with you,” he said. “There’s not much happening on the island. The fishermen are not going to charge you a ton of money to take you out to the surf. It’s not like here, where everything is touristy and organized and has prices. In Tahiti, surfing is a business. There are no surfers on Ra’ivavae.”
As before any outpost voyage, I wondered about what, aside from sailors’ blogs, had been written about the island. I first heard of Ra’ivavae in late 2003 in Lonely Planet’s latest edition of South Pacific.
In the chapter (the book’s longest) about French Polynesia, the Australs consumed just two of 88 pages. Five of the seven islands were ignored. Most of the section detailed Rurutu while, oddly, lush Tubuai (“doesn’t have much to see”) was dismissed. Ra’ivavae received two short paragraphs. Its airport was just a year old at the time.
In some ways, I was drawn to Ra’ivavae by its name alone—but also to an extent by its remote location, its surf potential, and “precious gem” factor, to quote South Pacific. The island itself is the vestige of a huge, long-ago-collapsed volcano, the exposed slopes rich with squawking white terns and dense, dark-green forests, the scene laced with waterfalls during the frequent (and frequently heavy) rainfall.
As I discovered, all of Ra’ivavae radiated with a magnificent beauty that any eyes would find pleasing. Despite the airport, the island lacks hotels, bars, restaurants, hospitals, doctors, rental cars, banks, credit card machines, fishing charters, shark dives, 4×4 safaris, glass-bottom boat tours, honeymoon packages, infinity pools, luxury cruises, and overwater bungalows. Aside from a handful of pensions, there is no touristic framework. It’s been said that Ra’ivavae is a pre-1961 version of BoraBora, both isles richly photogenic and endowed with rugged mountains, wet jungles, azure lagoons, and sandy motus.
Unfortunately, per Thouard and his report of the supposed ease of hiring a boatman, I found communications difficult. Most locals could barely speak French—Ra’ivavaean and Tahitian are the default tongues. Stationed at Ra’irua, the imported gendarmes spoke bits of English, but to me they seemed arrogant and completely useless during what was, for them, an overpaid, two- or four-year tropical vacation away from France. (Ra’ivavae has no crime.)
Just four of the island’s 900 souls were English-fluent, one of them being 38-year-old Linda, a Ra’ivavaean (and 1997’s Miss Teenager des Australes) who ran my pension, a pretty spot against the steep-green jungle beneath horn-shaped Mont Taraia. Here the air was a harmony, a sound bath of wind and crickets and the creaking groan of trees, the blushing whoosh of leaves.
Weeks of storminess ceased the day I arrived. That first night was mesmerizingly clear and of perfect temperature, a soft, floaty tranquility, the sky brilliant with winter constellations despite the fullness of the moon, which rose at 5:30 p.m., just before dusk, to set at 4:30 a.m., when I heard distant ethereal hymns amid crickets in the swollen darkness, just a catnap from the rooster-waking dawn.
After breakfast, I approached Linda as she gathered yard waste to burn. She seemed confused and genuinely worried when I inquired about hiring a boatman to deliver me to, as I saw on one ancient, mildewed nautical map, the récif à fleur d’eau—“reef of flower water.” She said that, for a fee, she would be happy to drive me the three miles up to somewhat sheltered Ra’irua, where she would leave me, then return two hours later. As expected, I would reach the wave at Tuitui under my own power.
“Remember that this is Australs ocean, not like in Tahiti or the Societies,” she warned. “Here is very rough. Do you have a wetsuit and safety vest?”
“No.”
She looked apprehensive. “Okay. Well, I can drop you at the little wharf in front of the gendarmerie and maybe they will be able to see you in case something bad happens.”
I promised her I would be very careful and, as always, to shy from danger.
A few minutes into the drive, she pointed out to Motu Papararuu, where the ocean was a mess and had, from my airplane window, looked treacherous.
“You know about the fisherman who died there two weeks ago?”
I had indeed read a brief report online about the 55-year-old school bus driver who, along with his neighbor on the morning of Saturday, March 2, went spearfishing outside the reef. While they were subsurface, their boat went adrift. The bus driver swam after it. He and the boat were never seen again. This tale was a too common one of avoidable tragedy set at the heels of nature, the violent intercourse of tide, current, wind, swell, and depths beyond the safety of the lagoon. The reef corner at Papararuu looked particularly turbulent.
“Last week they had a little funeral for him,” Linda said, “but his wife is refusing to believe he is gone forever. She thinks he will someday come back alive. I’m thinking he will not. Tiger shark ate him, no?”
She stopped the van in the shade of a large mango tree in front of the gendarmerie.
“Praying no tiger shark for you.”
The lagoon’s nearshore water was surprisingly cool and murky, but, as I began the mile-long paddle, the water cleared and warmed slightly and its dark hue eased to azure. The lagoon was litter-free and smelled fresh, only lightly salty. The cyan color changed with various depths of the sandy bottom littered with coral heads. I was soon clenched by the wind’s teeth, and the coral heads became blurred through the chop, which stung my eyes. This was the leeward side of Ra’ivavae. Instead of blocking the wind, the island’s narrow, elongated shape and the hanging, mid-island valley funneled east/southeast trades hard into the northwest coast.
My view of the motu, which appeared as a rectangular bush, seemed to remain static and distant, the islet stubbornly refusing to enlarge against the horizon as I dug toward it, slowly and painfully, through the chop. After 30 minutes of this, I humped up onto a small beach of large coral rubble and walked into the forest of palm and ironwood, grateful for a respite from the wind.
I stepped through the ferns and spider webs, regrettably startling a flirting pair of white terns, my favorite bird of the tropics. The motu held evidence of human leisure—rustic sleeping structures, a windbreak, a fire pit, and a clear path from one shore to the other—yet I was very much alone, and felt unseen and untouchable.
Emerging from the forest, I found Tuitui’s surfside to be even rougher and, out a ways, there was a vague lefthander. It looked unsurfable, completely trashed by the trades. The strong, dangerous currents made the wave even less inviting. Even at peak high tide, which was not high at all (2.6 feet), the reef was dreadfully shallow. Still the wave was consistent, a jiggly and choppy blue, and the tide clock was ticking.
The lineup was raw and chaotic but there were mushy lefts of decent length. The waves were either wraparound southeasterly windswell or scraps of a distant residual southwest groundswell, or perhaps a mix, chest high at most, funky at best. It still afforded a heart-pounding, heavy-breathing session. I was glad to be there, in perpetual motion, fully exposed, in the remote recesses of French Polynesia.
Forty-five minutes later, the tide peaked and the waves flattened. The “channel” transformed into a whitecapped rip current that would, with inobservance, pull me out past the breakers toward a problematic future. Recalling the dead spearfisherman, I proned the whitewater of my final wave to the right, then straight in, managing just a few scrapes on the bottom of my board.
The mile return toward the gendarmerie went slightly faster but the wind, ripping through the bright midday, blew me a bit south. Below the island’s ring road, I clawed up onto rough, black boulders that lined the lagoon, arranged to prevent earth erosion below the asphalt. There, between ironwoods, I waited for Linda a minute or two before opting to gain ground and walk back toward her pension.
Soon an old blue pickup approached me from behind. In the cab sat two men, the fat passenger gnawing on a greasy baguette sandwich. I climbed into the cloth-covered metal bed, where there were four oily chainsaws. The driver was part of a roadside-clearing crew that was locked in constant battle with the island’s voracious vegetation. He seemed to know Linda, who, after I was dropped at the pension, apologized for her van having run out of gas.
After lunch, I borrowed a purple cruiser bike and pedaled it east into the stiff headwind along the bumpy south road. In the village of Vaiuru, at a drab magasin, which was sparsely stocked with imported dry goods and no fresh produce, I bought two semi-cold cans of Hinano, the name of which does not mean “beer,” as I had once humorously heard, but instead refers to the male inflorescence of the pandanus tree. I slouched and drank on the lagoon-front grass near a large Protestant church. Between sips, I gazed out at the flat coral cays and wished the barrier reef that linked them had been spliced with some tapered, Tahiti-esque passes. Fully exposed to Roaring Forties energy, Ra’ivavae’s south coast would then be a real surf destination during the Austral summer, when trades blew from the northeast.
Biking with the sunset back toward my pension, I again noticed that aside from the sheer ridges, most of Ra’ivavae is an explosion of vegetation, a jungle fecundity woven with numerous plots of taro and cassava. The air held a heavy, constant simmering hum of waves, crickets, and rustling boughs. Pedaling slowly, I passed no cars. Instead there were several idle children and adults along the road, with whom I exchanged smiles and ‘ia ora na (hello). The isle’s various common aromas were in the wind—manure, flowers, ocean, salt, pakalolo (cannabis), and the ubiquitous smell of burning debris—amid the occasional squeal of an agonized pig bound to a tree by a very short rope, or the bark of a scabietic dog. The atmosphere at low elevation was thick with a curious haze that mimicked the haze in my head.
I woke at 4 a.m. to a surprising stillness, a soft-focus tranquility. Instead of wind, I could hear the muted rumble of surf on the reef, 1.5-miles out. The full moon hung from the quiet coconut palms outside my window, where a family of chatty white terns lived, which I only heard in the early mornings and late afternoons. Eventually my dreams focused on tiny, one-tree Motu Papararuu, out there along on the reef, beneath the far-reaching gaze of Mont Matotea. The islet faced the southern horse latitudes, the calms of Capricorn, but was also in direct line of Roaring Forties fire. Knowing this, and that a large southwest swell was en route, I sought to try and surf Papararuu before things got out of control.
My window was slim. Rain clouds crept above the southern horizon. Two hours before high tide, with my board and small waterproof sling bag, I walked a quiet mile up to the long, wooden dock at Rauuru, where in previous days I had seen a few fishermen and their motorized va’a (dugout canoes). Along the way, I felt that the barrier reef’s broken line of whitewater, which greatly contrasted between the dark-gray horizon and the dark-blue lagoon, suggested the swell had not yet hit. I was relieved.
As I neared the dock, a small white pickup truck passed me and parked. Roped to the pilings was a long, green va’a. A burly, square-headed man exited the truck, already in his hooded black fullsuit. Carrying a weight belt and a spear gun, he walked straight to the boat. His black hair was close-cropped and he had a strange, toothbrush mustache.
He waded waist-deep into the lagoon, set the belt and gun on the dock and, with a halved plastic jug, began bailing water from the hull. We were the only two people around. He saw me and was perhaps confused—this strange white guy bumbling around with a surfboard. When we made eye contact, however, he waved and smiled.
“Bonjour, monsieur,” I said when I reached him. “Comment allez vous? Je ne parle ni français ni tahitien. Parlez vous anglais?”
He chuckled and looked back down. For a few moments he let his head drift lazily from side to side. I set my board on the dock and pulled my phone from the sling bag and began typing in Google Translate: I will pay you to take me to the small motu. Then I pointed at Papararuu, a dark smudge two miles away.
He squinted at the screen, then his eyes widened and he shrugged slightly, an expression that suggested, “Sure, why not?” He then said something that sounded French, possibly a question. I typed: Is 5,000 francs enough money for you to take me to the motu and retrieve me one hour later? He nodded, easily and agreeably, and motioned for me to step with my board down into his va’a, which reeked of fish and was powered by an old Mercury motor.
When he was finished readying and was about to pull-start the outboard, I typed and showed him another translation: Thank you very much, sir. I appreciate your kindness.
Stowing my bag, we angled toward Papararuu and communicated with the universal visual Braille of hand gestures and head nodding. Pointing at his watch, he promised to return for me in one hour. Gliding across the smooth, blue-gray lagoon, the small motor steadily humming away, I leaned over the gunwale and peered into the warm water rushing past, lightly dragging my fingers through it. Colorful coral heads, pale glowing sandbars, schools of baitfish—Ra’ivavae’s inshore was a great spread of nature punctured with the scenic high island, a “mountain fortress,” as 20th century anthropologist David Marshall called it.
I wondered whether my captain’s pedigree was one of expert seamanship, based simply on his relaxed countenance and comfort atop the water. Short on land and seeking more of it, forced to explore only by sea, ancient Polynesians were preeminent sailors of the day and, naturally, ranged far and wide. His canoe appeared to be handmade, possibly carved near the Rauuru dock, which I took to be his home port. I had observed that lagoon fishermen were often localized, fishing the zones nearest their villages. I suspected this was even more prevalent before internal combustion engines changed everything throughout the Pacific.
In what would have then taken an hour or more to reach powered by man and paddle, the Mercury made possible in 10 minutes. The motu was, of course, much larger when it was upon us, the whole of it consumed by one rather broad ironwood tree, itself surrounded by dense green vegetation. Keeping the starboard outrigger in the water, the captain expertly angled his canoe to the right and nudged its bow onto the small, white-sand beach on the motu’s lee shore, where I stepped off with my bag and board, confident he would return an hour later. If he did not, I would be in for a long paddle back to shore, at least twice that of the paddle after my Tuitui session days prior.
Once on the motu’s bare-rock ocean side, I could fully grasp the rawness of Ra’ivavae’s oceanic wilderness, its severity darkened by the mass of gray clouds looming before me. Yet it was this impending storm that becalmed the wind and afforded just the slightest wafts to lift and polish the faces of small, southeasterly windswell, which alternated with the small but orderly forerunners of southwesterly groundswell. The lulls allowed me to easily reach the lineup, which, due to the small surf, was not far from bare reef. Despite the shallow and jagged nature of the coral a few feet beneath me, I was comforted by being able to see and touch the bottom—an anchor point on the proverbial world’s edge.
Wading into the sea, I gauged the setup. It was clear that the only makeable waves were sectiony, chesthigh lefts—the groundswell forerunners—that arrived from 215° SW and broke along a somewhat lee section of the reef 400 yards to my northwest, which was actually behind me. The motu graced the elbow, the very tip of Ra’ivavae’s southwestern reef, before it curved up and ran northeasterly up to Tuitui and, ultimately, Passe Teavarua.
The littoral sweep of northwesterly current pulled me from the elbow to the surfable section of reef. Three-hundred yards farther up was a slight drop-off where, conveniently for me, the captain chose to spearfish. His canoe was anchored in a narrow gap in the barrier reef, apparently a sort of pool sheltered by exposed coral, even at high tide. This was the dive site of the two aforementioned spearfishermen. Surely my captain knew the one who’d died.
The rideable waves formed in one very small, particular section of reef. The takeoffs were steep. Each ride was similar. After an enjoyable, semi-hollow section, the wave quickly slowed and flattened over a wide hole before it recharged in the shallows, where it jacked and forced me to race its lip before it harshly expired onto damp heads of coral. The more westerly sets of forerunners broke parallel, smashing straight into the reef. Over the adjacent depths, just past the captain’s canoe (and where I assumed him to be underwater, though I did not see him emerge to toss any speared fish into the canoe), no waves broke, instead favoring a swirling chaos of current.
Time passed quickly and, right at peak high tide, precisely one hour after he’d left me at the motu, I at last saw the captain’s hooded head emerge. He obviously had not held his breath the entire time—I had simply missed seeing him surface for oxygen. I let the sweep push me into the edge of the lagoon, where I paddled over to meet him. The Mercury was already running and he seemed happy to see me. Certainly he was happy with his catch: 16 small reef fish in less than an hour.
By mid afternoon, the blue troposphere had been sealed with dark-gray clouds and the island, almost monotone, seemed to swell and take on an ominous feel. After the brief sunny spell, rain was to return. As darkness gathered, the wind arrived with force. At the bungalow I heard distant singing voices from the church, a rooster or two, and the chirps of a small, pale gecko.
Finally, come half past nine, the long-pregnant sky exploded as the first of many great rain bursts swept across the island, a symphony with the night crickets, first faintly, then strong and stratiform, rapping like static on my wooden bungalow’s corrugated iron roof. The warm darkness swirled with that wonderfully deep, unmistakable wet-soil scent of petrichor, blown in on the sweet breeze through my open windows. As the humidity soared, all the world was adrip, and again Ra’ivavae was entirely unsurfable.
—
Excerpted from Kew’s collection of travel essays, Rainbownesia (Spruce Coast Press).
[Feature image: With its wind and raw exposure to southern pulses, it’s fair to ask if Ra’ivavae is surfable. The answer depends on your point of view]
