It is day 35 of the crossing and we will be in the Gambier Islands tomorrow. I will slow down the boat a bit tonight to time our arrival in the Southern pass of the lagoon for the morning so we can see where we are going. I probably could do this at night with all the navigational tools on board, but it would be foolish. There is no point in risking a strike on a reef. My best navigation tool are my eyes, and they work well in daylight. I know I can trust the sea charts. As we travelled, we have learned a few things. All the French territories that we went to, had well updated charts which is not the case with most ex-British colonies who were left on their own after gaining their independence. I simply do not trust any charts from any ex-British colonies. Some of their surveys date back to 1867 and were done with a plomb ball on a cotton twine marked on a chart from a sextant reading as precise as the rhum-filled mate who was holding the sextant back then.
After the initial dramas of the crossing, the rest of the journey went smooth and well. We fired up the engine only a few hours every 3 or 4 days to produce freshwater from our reverse osmosis water maker and top up the water tanks so we could rinse the salt off the boat and the sails. We hit the trade winds on day 11 of our crossing and they stayed steady at 20 knots from the southeast for the rest of the journey keeping the boat at hull speed most of the time. The fishing was poor with only 2 mahi-mahis caught. I am not really good at this fishing thing, and it is a skill I would not mind learning. I probably have all the wrong equipment anyway. Still, the fishes were really nice and a very agreeable change from the chicken. Danielle always prepare the Mahi Mahi the same way; “Poisson cru a la Tahitienne”. A Swiss sailor taught us this recipe in St Martin in the Caribbean, and it is a favorite, very simple, and quick to prepare. You simply cut your fish filets in small cubes that you soak in lime juice for twenty minutes. You then drain the juice out, mix some diced onions, pour some more fresh lime juice and coconut milk. Et voila.
We are a bit excited about tomorrow. There is always the apprehension of a new landing. Is the anchorage safe? Crowded? Will the authorities be easy on the paperwork? Will the locals be friendly? A yes on everything would be appreciated because we need a break from the sea. We have lost quite a bit of muscular mass and we need to reappoint ourselves with walking. This crossing has been a true test of seamanship for both of us. Our longest crossing had been 9 days prior to this one. It was between Bermuda and Brithish Virgin Islands. Tomorrow will be day 36. We will have seen not one but two full moons. I am almost done with my night-watches-psycho-therapy sessions. I have only one left to do tonight. Danielle is opening a few cans for tonight’s dinner. We ran out of fresh veggies two weeks ago. We still have a few lemons and oranges. We had to throw away the onions and the potatoes a week ago as they were spoiling. We have been on canned food diet for the last week. Tonight’s dinner will be canned sauerkraut with canned carrots and canned sausages. Danielle has the charge of the boat from 4 to midnight. We eat at five, I go to bed at 6, she wakes me at midnight where I on duty till 8am. We spend our days together. It works well for us.
Danielle’s wakes me at midnight. She goes to her bunk. I get on with my coffee/shower/breakfast routine. And it is time to go one last time on the psych-therapist chair in the cockpit but not without going through some navigation housekeeping. We are moving at 6 knots and the southern pass of the lagoon is 26 miles away. 4 am is too early to enter the pass. It will still be dark. I slow the boat down to 4 knots by taking 2 reefs on the main sail and rolling in a bit of the yankee until I see 4 knots on the GPS. I am looking at the speed over ground. I do not look at my instruments that gives me a speed reading over the water. There is a 1 knot difference between the 2 readings because of a current pushing us westward. That must be accounted for. 6 hours at 1 knot is 6 miles extra distance. The GPS shows 4 knots, the instruments show 3 knots. We are good. That will put us in the pass around 6 am. Now I can sit in the doctor’s chair looking at the stars again while getting hammered by my thoughts.
Those 36 nights, spent alone, with nothing to do will be with me for the rest of my life. I will probably refer to it often in my future years. I think I am more comfortable with myself. I think I understand my brain a bit better. The first few nights after the Galapagos were unpleasant. We had settled in a routine. There was not much to do. The autopilot was running the show 99.9% of the time. The wind was steady at 15 knots so there was no sail’s change to be done. These first few nights were truly my first experiences of being alone with my thoughts. I did not like it. I had all sorts of forgotten memories popping up in my conscience all the time. It was very annoying. Things I had completely forgotten about and things I wanted to forget also. Some went back to my early youth; others were very recent. Events that were about lost friends, missed opportunities, mistakes, apologies never presented, quarrels, hurt feelings or deep sorrow. As the voyage went on, those thoughts slowly changed to happier thoughts. I was making a conscious effort to remember happy events. Slowly but surely those happy thoughts became more frequent, and the darker ones disappeared. Let bygones be bygones. We all have different yearnings and missions. Those 35 nights helped me understand what made me happy… and sad. From now on, I will be easier for me to find the right path.
The moon has disappeared in the west, and it is dark again with this show of stars and the clear milky way above. In an hour, the morning star will rise in the east followed by the first lights. The show in front will be different today. Land in our grasp. Danielle wanted to be wakened up early to see the sunrise and share the first sight of land. It is 4:30 am and I go down in the galley to brew some coffee. I do not need to wake up Danielle, the coffee smell does it. We go together outside in the cockpit to wait for the sun to rise behind us. Within minutes, the stars disappear, and the Gambier Islands reveal themselves. My first impression is a sense of beauty and remoteness. The next meaningful island is Tahiti at more than 1000 nautical miles away to the Northwest. We are only a few miles away and can clearly see the Island of Aukena in front and Mangareva to the north of it. In 30 minutes, I will fire up the engine and take a turn to starboard to enter the lagoon pass.
The engine starts and I make a 90 degree turn to the north and I can see a few hundred meters away the two bouees marking the channel. As predicted, they are exactly where they are supposed to be. “Vive la France”. We have 8 miles to go straight north before our next turn to starboard to get in the Mangareva anchorage. That gives us about an hour and a half to tidy up the boat and switch it from sailing machine to a comfier floating recreational vehicle. As we enter the pass, the ocean swells automatically disappear, and the boat stabilizes with no more rolling. I drop the sails and roll them neatly. I pull out the dinghy and inflate it on the deck. I pull the anchor out of the locker and install it on the bowsprit linking it to its 200-meter chain. Danielle is busy inside converting the two aft bunks into their normal aft cabin mode and settee. She can now open the master cabin in the bow that was condemn for the crossing. It is impossible to sleep there in open sea. You would get splattered on the cabin ceiling; too jumpy up there.
With the engine pushing us, I can run the water maker to top up the tanks and rinse the salt off the boat. The heat exchanger of the engine also acts as a water heater, so we shower in turn. As we make the turn for the anchorage, we can see only 4 boats in there. Only a few cruisers choose this route. The bulk of the 300 boats that leave Panama annually travel together towards the Marquesas followed by Tahiti and stay within the tropical belt on the easier coconut milk run. We are way outside the beaten path. And I love it already. Our friends Uwe and Dana are already anchored, I recognize their big Hans Christian ketch from a mile away. There will be rhum tonight. We drop the anchor in strong holding ground and shut the engine off. We made it.
First order of business is to clear us and the boat in the country. This can be a messy and painful bureaucratic process involving 3 or 4 different governmental agencies in any British colony. It is usually an easy and painless event in any French territory. I hope that the Tahitians will have adopted the usual simplicity of a single stop at any “Gendarmerie” (police station) to do our paperwork. We splash the dinghy and pull the cord on our outboard and head for the main dock of Rikitea, the main settlement of the island group on Mangareva. Everyone we see sends us a beautiful Tahitian welcome “Iorana!” and point us toward the Gendarmerie a hundred meters away. We already feel on another planet. No hotels, no MacDonalds or Kentucky Fried Chicken is a definite change from the Caribbean. Everyone is well dressed in colorful pareo with frangipani flowers to their ears. The lone French station officer greets us with a warm welcome and is happy to see that we are Canadian and French speaking. In 5 minutes, we are out of there with a 6-month visa and a stamp in our passport. “Vive la France”.
There is no banks or ATM on the Island but there is post office that has a versatility of services and acts almost like a bank. They give us some local currency drawn off our credit cards. We will spend our first coins in 36 days. But where to? There is one small café with 3 tables on the next corner. We enter and find out that it is the only café/bistro of the island. It will have to do. There is a couple of Polynesian women at 1 table and a single white tattooed unshaved guy with no shirt on in front of a coffee at the other table. We sit at the last table. A very big women gets out of the kitchen with a huge smile on her face. She welcomes us and mentions that there is only one dish on the menu today: “poisson cru a la tahitienne”. We smile back and order two plate with two cold beers. Right away, the lone guy at the next table steps in and starts commenting on the fact that it is only 11 am and too early for a beer. Coming from him, it is hard to tell if it is sarcasm, impoliteness, or his way of being nice. I reply that it is not 11 o’clock but that it is 36 days and 11 o’clock. By his demeanor, I see that he gets it that we are cruisers freshly disembarked. He is tall, fit, lean with a massive eagle tattoo on the chest and a tacky big gold chain around the neck holding a golden eagle pendant. In the eagle claws, I can see a shiny sky-blue colored pearl. The guy reeks military. He has a tattoo on his bicep with a latin maxim on it: “Semper Fi”. It is a short for Semper Fidelis, I remember my 3 years of latin class from High school. That means either Forever Loyal or Faithful.
- “Military?”, I ask.
- “The Legion, retired”, he answers.
The Legion is an expeditionary corps from the French Army. They are all over where there are French interest to be protected. I have met a few in my life; 2 Dolphin helicopter pilots in James Bay in Canada, 1 dive instructor in St Martin and 1 port master in Guadeloupe. They are all from the same mold; tough, fit, resourceful and they have no time for idiots.
- “I am Claude Michel, this is Danielle.”
- “Scanzi, Yves Scanzi.”
- “Those great social skills of yours, teachings from the Legion?”
- “It weeds out the idiots. Where are you coming from?”
- “Canadians, sailed from Panama.”
- “Did you stop in the Marquesas?”
- “No, but we almost stopped in Pitcairn 2 days ago, but it was too bumpy to anchor, so we continued on here.”
“Who wants to go to Pitcairn. It is a lone rock with its bunch of inbred idiots. I organized the logistics two years ago to bring New Zealand officials, judges and police after the scandals of kids raped by the elders on that island. I am certain that Captain Bligh from the Bounty is laughing at the situation in its tomb. Thank the god of wind to discourage you from stopping there. There is nothing to see. There is nothing romantic and pretty about the mutiny on the Bounty. There is nothing to be seen on Pitcairn.”
The plates of fish arrive. The plates are made of plastic from two different colors and none of the cutlery matches. As I pay more attention to the surroundings, none of the chairs or the tables match either. One thing is for sure, we will not die of hunger today. We probably have 1 kilo of fish cubes in our plates with half a baguette splatter with garlic butter. The beers are the big kinds also at 750ml. The fish is very simply done. I can see only fish cubes and coconut milk with no onions or chili. I do not recognize the fish; it is not white like wahoo or pink like yellow fin tuna. It is of a very light pink color and the cubes do not hold very well. My guess is it is very tender and soft.
Scanzi is looking at me analyzing the plate.
- “Albacore tuna, it’s the season now” he says without me asking anything.
We take our first bite out of the mountain of fish. Danielle is smiling, and with cause. It is a simple plate but a very flavorful plate. I detect only 3 ingredients: fish, lime, and coconut milk. The lime taste is very strong, green, and not very acidic. It does not overwhelm the fish. The Albacore is soft, moist, and as tasteful as it is appealing.
Scanzi is talkative and in your face. I push another question to keep him busy and get acquainted with the local gossip.
- “So, what’s your story? You are far from your motherland.”
I let him talk while I polish my plate. That fish is incredible. I learn that he was posted in the Gambiers to oversee the dismantling of some military infrastructures. Gambier has an airport with a very long runway used as a back-up airport for the French military and a support base in the years of the nuclear tests. The atoll of Mururoa where the tests were done is only 400 km away. After the nuclear campaign was over in 1995, the Legion was assigned to dismantle and decommission the infrastructures in Gambier. Scanzi retired later, met a Polynesian woman, got married and became a father.
I ask him about his blue pearl.
“This is the nicest pearl I ever produced on my pearl farm. It is flawless. It is round and it is sky-blue.”
I have never seen a pearl like that. I thought pearls where white. I knew that French Polynesia was a producer of pearls but that was the whole extent of my pearl knowledge. Danielle gives me the wink that it is time to stop talking and start moving. Scanzi cannot help himself and laughs at me that my partner is the real boss in the couple. He brags that in his household, he is the boss. Talkative and in your face, no doubt about it. I like him. French Polynesia is famous or infamous for 3 things; its nuclear testing that brought world condemnation on the territory, the role it played in the story of the HMS Bounty and its mutiny, and its alluring black pearls. Somehow, we had just met a guy on our first hour on Polynesian soil who somehow had its sticky fingers in the 3 stories.
As we walk back toward the dock, our legs feel like heavy bricks. We have walked a total of 400 meters today and it feels like 40 km. We have lost some muscle mass and we will need to rebuild it over the next few weeks. Back on the boat, we get a call on the VHF from our friends Uwe and Dana and learn that we are invited to celebrate our successful crossings on their boat tonight. Uwe was a chef in a previous life. Our stomachs and livers are going to be put to the test tonight. Crossings are always challenging and the landing in a peaceful anchorage is always a big relief where you can appreciate a sense of security and deserved peace. Marking that event with friends who went through the same ordeals is always cause for noisy celebrations.
This island group would be an incredibly popular destination if it was in the Caribbean. It is a well enclosed lagoon with its mix of High volcanic island and low sandy cays. There is nothing that beautiful in the Caribbean. The population is only 1500 of Polynesian descent and mainly concentrated on the island Mangareva. I can only imagine how great the diving can be with this continuous sharp wall that drops for hundreds of meters on the outside contour of the island group. The color of the water is strong indigo blue and is a minefield of kaleidoscopic coral bummies that no tourist snorkels. There are no service stations, hotels, restaurants, or supermarkets. Remote for sure. Authentically exotic, absolutely. It will be a great spot to do nothing here for the next few weeks.
The original general plan for the trip when we left in 2004 was to go in the South seas until we repaired our souls and comeback to Canada after 2 or 3 years and start working again. We were in year number 3 of the trip, and we had no envy or urges to return to the snowy rat race. At the same time, we had money left for the trip to do another 2 years. I was slowly starting to look for business opportunities along the way. The obvious way to go would be to look for something in the hospitality business. It would be easy for us. Danielle was a great cook and I had worked as a bartender and waiter. We had a bit of cash and we had run a business with good success, and we would probably do good with a bar, a restaurant, or a small Inn somewhere. I was not excited by that prospect. I knew its routines and pitfalls. The other option would be graphic design and communication. That was not exciting at all. That business had killed me once and it could do the same again. In any case, I was keeping my eyes open.
The next day, we went for a walk on the main street. We discovered a quiet place where everyone salutes everyone with a smile. There was 1 convenience store near the dock ran by a Chinese guy. He had all the essentials except vegetables. We were used to the French canned goods. We had eaten a whole bunch of them in Saint Martin, Guadeloupe, and Les Saintes. It was all very affordable and very good. Pates, duck legs, cassoulet and terrines were all to French standard and were a very nice break from the British corned beef and canned baked beans in ketchup. As we passed the main dock, there was this massive brown mastiff dog that started barking at us while moving toward us. We are not afraid of big dogs. We had two big rottweilers in our previous life and missed the companies of dogs. Danielle put her head at the level of the mastiff by bending a bit while slowly talking to it. It took no time for the dog to wag its tail and stop barking. The owner came out of the house, it was Scanzi.
- “You are spoiling my dog! I am trying to make a guard dog out of her. Please stay away from her.”
Danielle was not listening and was rubbing the belly of the dog who was on its back in the middle of the street.
Scanzi came walking toward us discouraged.
- “She never leaves the compound and want to eat alive any passerby. And now look at her acting like a small poodle in the street. Shameful”
- “She has a new master”, I replied. “What’s her name?”
- “Nutella”
- “How the hell do you want her to be a guard dog with a chocolate name like that?”
He invites us for coffee at his house. We meet is wife, Agnes. She is lovely with a smile bigger than the sun. I ask him about the secret to find vegetables on the island.
- “When in Rome, do like the romans” he answers. “We get carrots once a month when the supply ship is in. It will be here next week. But I do not bother anymore. I just do like the locals. I eat the local stuff, plantains, breadfruit, green papaya in salad and boiled taro leaves in coconut milk. It is all good for you. As for fruit, it is easy. You can get bananas, papayas, grapefruits, mandarins and limes as much as you want. It grows like weed everywhere. You will survive. One thing though that is critical here; every tree is owned by someone or a family. You need to ask permission to take some fruits. Please do this. If you ask politely, they will give you everything. Polynesians are very nice.”
- “What about fish?”, I ask.
- “Do not spearfish anything out of the lagoon, most fish carry the ciguatera toxin here. But everything outside of the lagoon is all good and plentiful like wahoo, albacore, yellowfin tuna and spanish mackerel. “
Ciguatera is a nasty neurotoxin that can accumulate in your body and cause some weird neurological problems. Some fish will accumulate the toxin without any harmful effect on them but once you eat too much of fish and accumulate a certain level of toxins, you get very sick. If you accumulate too much of it, it can be lethal. It takes months to metabolize the toxin out of your system, so you could be sick for a long while. A lot of research has been done on the problem as it affects most countries in the tropical belt. The toxin is mostly present in reef fish that are piscivore (who eats other fishes). The ciguatoxin is secreted by a small plankton dynoflagellate called Gambierdiscus Toxicus. The culprit was first discovered right here in the Gambier Island, thus the name. As long as you stick to pelagic fishes like tuna, there is no risks.
After a while, we head back to the boat to prepare for our first look on what is underwater and our first dip in the South Pacific. We pack a lunch and throw everything in the dinghy. Even though we are technically in the tropical zone at 23-degree South, the water is a cool 19 degree Celsius, and we will carry our long wetsuits. We zip on the dinghy to a long sandy cay a few miles east to Totegegie for our first trial at snorkeling. Danielle and I have done a lot of diving over the years in the Caribbeans. We went multiple times to Cuba, Bahamas, Turks, Bonaire, Grenada, St Vincent, St Martin, Guadeloupe, and the San Blas Islands. We thought we had seen plenty of nice stuff, but nothing prepared us for the unspoiled Gambier. Think of it as the best dive site in the Caribbean and multiply the fish diversity by 10 and the coral diversity by 20. Then, triple the size on everything.
After 45 minutes in the water, we were starting to shiver and decided to take a break. We finned back to the beach where our dinghy was pulled and sat under a coconut tree. Danielle had bought a nice piece of Emmenthal cheese at the shop with a baguette in the morning. We opened a bottle of Muscadet and poured a glass while looking out towards the lagoon. Another smile on my face. Small moments. I am getting used to this. Danielle went for a long walk on the beach while I did a power snooze. On her way back from her walk, she had already made the decision that we would go snorkeling again. For the seven weeks that we would stay in the Gambiers, we would go every day.
When I woke up the next morning, I knew we would not be able to get out of the boat before 10 am. I could smell the yeast. Danielle was making some bread. Danielle makes bread every 3 days. She is good at it. She can also make bagels, croissants, and rolls. The bread gets out of the oven at around 10 am. We are stuck here in the meantime. Good, I want to check all the systems on the boat to see how well everything survived the crossing. I have to change the water maker filters anyway. At 10, the bread came out of the oven with the same homey smell of comfort. I was about to take a warm slice with cold butter when Danielle interrupted me.
- “That bread is not for us. I am not going to make bread here when they sell fresh baguette at 8 am on the corner. That bread is for Scanzi to thank him. You go and deliver it now while it is hot.”
Warm bread has this effect on people. It is a message. It is a nice thank-you-note. I fired the dinghy and went to Scanzi’s house. Nutella welcomed me with a waging tail and zero barking. Scanzi was out on his porch tinkering with something. He looked at me and started winging.
- “You see, my dog is now spoiled. No barking. Your fault.”
- “Good morning to you too.” I replied.
I give him the bread. He takes it in his hands and feels the warmth. He slowly brings it to his nose and smiles. He thanks me and I go back to the boat. In the same afternoon, we get a VHF call from Scanzi. In the real world, you would get a phone call from Scanzi. But we are not in the real world and every household on Mangareva has a VHF in their house because everybody works on the water with a VHF in their boats either fishing or pearl farming. Why bother with phones when you have free airwaves. Yes, everybody can listen to everyone, but it is good entertainment when there is nothing on TV. He tells us that he will be waiting for us at the dock to show us around the island.
When we land, he jumps on Danielle and hug her tightly while thanking her for the bread. Bread does that to people. He came with a four-door Mazda pick-up truck.
- “Hop in, I will show you around.” he orders us.
Mangareva is not a big island. It is about 8km long by 1 km wide and is quite hilly. There are two roads, one on the South shore and one on the North shore. There is a connecting road the cross the Island through the hills. Scanzy drives very slowly to kill time because it will not take long before we have seen the whole rock. On its way back from the North shore road in the hills, he stops at 1 lonely house where and old man is sitting on the porch. His wife comes out of the house to see who is stopping to break their routine. From far but while walking towards them, Scanzi starts talking loudly.
- “Emile! I have two poor sod of Canadians who are in dire need of vegetables. Can you help?”
The old man gets off its chair, picks up a plastic bag and walks toward an enormous vegetable patch. He comes back a few minutes later with the filled bag. We offer money and he categorically refuses. We thank him. He offers us coffee and Scanzi declines for us, and we walk back to the truck. In the truck, Scanzi tells us to give 2000 Francs (about 20$) to his wife Agnes who will buy some groceries for them. They need the money. They were just too proud to ask for it. This thing about saving face. One thing we did discovered in our travels; the poorer the people, the more generous they are. A stark contrast with our previous life. Another smile on my face.
On our way back to his house, we invite him for dinner at the cafe. He laughs and declines. The café is closed now and opens only for lunch… if they open at all. But he says that he will meet us there tomorrow for lunch.
We had a long chat the following day. And this time, it was more serious, no more jokes, no more games. I did not need to ask a lot of questions, I just had to listen. Scanzi can talk. It was good talk. he was a mine of practical information of someone who has lived simply in the South Pacific and understands the local culture and life in a remote location. Even though we had been travelling for a few years, Danielle and I were still very stuck in our city ways and had not been exposed yet to the spartan life of the South Pacific. Mangareva was the typical French territory. Even though the local economy did not justify it, there was a medical clinic, a post office, a gendarmerie, a dentist, civil servants to keep the government services organized like schools, port operations, airport operations, road maintenance and mayoral leadership. We would discover later that any ex British colony islands of that size in Tonga, Fiji or Cook Islands would have none of these services. In its own way, Mangareva was civilized and developed.
Still, you had to be resourceful in Mangareva. You needed to be a mechanic, electrician, beekeeper, fisherman, goat herder, gardener, carpenter, plumber, and politician. If not, the Island would eat you alive. Scanzi asked us what our trades were. He concluded that bartending, illustrator, graphic design, and communication strategy were completely useless skills in the real world of tropical desert island life. He was looking for a MIG-welder to finish his aluminum trailer. He would have to wait for the next sailboat and pray hard that the occupant was not an accountant, poet or architect; another set of useless skills according to him.
We did order another round of coffee while letting him go on with his flood of information. I broached the subject of pearl farming and asked him if he was still farming pearls. Now that kept him going for another hour. It was a touchy subject, and we could feel it. He was not talking about pearl farming. He was talking about all the misery and problems that plagued pearl farming.
- “The pearl industry in Tahiti is dead! No matter what way you look at it, everybody in the industry is making a fortune except the farmer. The farmers always get screwed. We get squeezed by the wholesalers who beat the prices down. We get squeezed by the retailers who plays the farmers against each other. We get squeezed by other farmers who give their pearls away at cheap auctions. We get squeezed by the government on licensing fees and regulations. We get squeezed by the department of Environment every 5 minutes with their constant new regulations. We get squeezed by other farmers who steal our pearls, and we get squeezed by other farmers who produce the lowest quality possible so the whole industry suffers.”
I was a bit disappointed. Pearl farming felt like a cool job. At first glance, it ticked all the boxes for me. It played to my love of the sea and biology. It was done in the tropics. It involved diving in a lagoon. And you could make a living out of it.
I pressed another question about it.
- “tell me Scanzi. What does it involve, the farming bit I mean.”
- “Pearl farming is not difficult. It is a lot of work though. It’s farming. Farmers cannot be lazy. If you follow that principle, you are OK. I have nothing to do tomorrow. Come in the morning. I will bring you to the best farmer on the Island so you can see what the fuss is all about. His name is Dominique.”
At 7 the next morning, I had Danielle drop me to the dock. Life starts early in the Islands and I was not worry of waking up anybody. I arrived to Scanzi’s house. He was already outside. I asked him if I was too early. He replied by saying that I was late because half the day had already passed. We drove no more than 1 km and arrive on a house on the shore. There was also a walkway on the water that went to a shed on stilts where we met with Dominique.
Dominique is another retired military grunt. He had the same demeanor and allure as Yves. He, also, was married to a local Polynesian and had 2 daughters working with him that day. Obviously, Yves had brought me to the right place because that guy was a passionate soul. His mind was flying in many directions at the same time. He started talking with Yves about the disasters in the pearl markets. Yves had pulled out just a few years before from the industry. His farm was not profitable anymore. He used to have good income from it but the prices had collapsed in the last few years making life for everyone quite hard. Both Yves and Dominique blamed the overproduction and the poor quality of pearls produced.
The French Polynesian black pearl industry had started in the early 70’s with the help of Japanese technicians in search of new venture in the pearl world after their dominance in the Japanese and the Australian pearl industry. The black pearls are produced from an oyster that is fairly common in the South Pacific, the Black-lipped oyster. The pearl is never black. It can have a dark tone but is mostly grey or green with different overtones. Nobody agrees on why it is called the black pearl. Some say that it was a Japanese concept to differentiate them from the Japanese white pearls. Other say it is because the pearl come from the black-lipped oyster. In the beginning, the new colors were a hit on the market and many early strands could sell well in excess of 1 million$. They were now selling for less than 3000$ at retail leaving only a few dollars in the hands of the farmers. The Japanese had now left French Polynesia and had been replaced by Chinese technicians who were working in massive farms. Some farms were now producing in excess of 500 000 pearls per year. The Chinese way of overproduction and poor-quality control had created all sorts of distortions in the pearl industry. French Polynesia’s pearl industry was now in a downward spiral. The more they produced, the lower was the price… the more they had to produce the following year so they could stay afloat… bringing yet more deceiving news from the pearl auctions.
Dominique was generous with his time and explanations. He was hiding nothing. For him, pearl farming was not an art. It was a science. He had trained with the Japanese and he was training his daughters. He bragged that he had improved on the Japanese model. He had a mini laboratory where he was raising oyster tissue culture to better understand the physiology and histology of the oyster. He was trying to understand how to better control the pearl quality and general health of the oyster. He was making his own workbenches and tools. The guy was a real beaver. He was also working on the politics of the industry. He wanted to form a pearl farmer association to counteract the power forces of the market. A few years later after we met, he would go on and form GIE Poe O Rikitea, a farmer association of 80 members who organizes their own auctions. Since we met him in 2006 and to this day, Dominique has published or co-published a gold mine of powerful applied scientific articles who are still strong references in the industry today.
I came back to Danielle for lunch that day with mixed feelings. We went for snorkeling in the afternoon. That cheered me up. But in the evening, I could not help myself. All I could think about was my few hours of the morning with Dominique. I was trying to reconcile how you could have a pearl farm and be profitable. There was a strong disconnect between what the pearl prices were in a jewelry store and what was the price that the farmers were getting. There ought to be a better formula somewhere, somehow. I knew science, so I could probably be a good farmer. I knew business so I could probably be a good seller of pearls. I was not foolish though, this was a high-risk venture in a huge world market where the market forces cannot be controlled, no matter how smart you are. If one day I would do pearls, I would need a solid plan with a better set of circumstances than the one found here in the Gambier.
Danielle and I would spend the following 7 weeks snorkeling and enjoying the lost life on a small Island in the middle of the South Pacific. I would spend a lot of time with Yves who would teach me everything he knew from the local life. From how to hunt a tiger shark who becomes a menace in a lagoon or how to prepare and cook a stingray “Au beurre noir et citron”. Yves could not help himself, he just had to talk. That was good talk. Because after 7 weeks there, I knew anything I needed to know to build a pearl farm from scratch.