Bora Bora to Beveridge Reef on Yacht Watermelon.

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October, 1992
We left Bora Bora, which was a bit of a disappointment to us and had extremely mild weather, so stopped at Maupiti - a beautiful island, and probably the nicest of the Society Islands in our opinion. We only stayed two days, long enough to do some snorkeling off the yacht, and then we left expecting a nice sail to Beveridge Reef only to have the wind die out completely so we decided to go into the reef at Mopelia to wait for the wind to come up. We had been advised against going there by the French gendarmes in Moorea - they said that the pass is very narrow and dangerous and unmarked. I think that Peter spent too much time as a boy minding the farm's Black Angus bull, and has picked up some of its thick-headedness.

Telling Peter "you can't" or "it's too dangerous" is like waving a red flag in front of his eyes. His jaw sets, his eyes glaze, he starts hyperventilating, and then off we go - to whatever the fates have in store for us. The gendarmes were right that it's a nasty pass - once you start in you can't change your mind because there's not enough room to turn around, and the current is always flowing out of the pass, generally at about 4 knots or more. But it's quite a short pass, several hundred feet maximum, and once in all you have to be careful of are the scattered coral heads in the lagoon. Since it's uncharted and uninhabited except for a half dozen pearl divers, it's another wonderfully unspoiled place. It's the only time we remember seeking shelter because of a lack of wind.

Next stop, Beveridge Reef, is a coral atoll about 5 miles wide, 2 miles long - a lagoon about 40' deep fringed by a coral reef circling the whole thing, unbroken except for a single pass into the lagoon that is about 300 feet wide. Since the reef is completely awash and so difficult to see, it’s considered a "dangerous" reef. Even knowing the reef was there, and approaching it in midmorning, we didn't see the reef until we were about 3 miles away in dead calm weather.

We spent a lot of time exploring a 60' fishing boat that went up on the reef in April of this year. At low tide the boat is sitting in, at most, 6 inches of water, and it's about 100 or 200 feet from the edge of the reef. The story we hear is that the boat lost its GPS and the captain was navigating by sextant and hit the reef during a bad storm, which is understandable - sun and stars obscured by clouds, poor visibility on a madly rolling boat. It's very sad to see it sitting there with its bottom torn out. Peter was in pig heaven salvaging all kinds of "good stuff" from the wreck. There are three other old wrecks on the reef, one of which appears to be an old whaler - nothing left except a huge fisherman's anchor, a few iron knees and a cylinder that might have been part of an old steam windlass. Since wooden whalers haven't been plying the South Seas since the turn of the century, it is some indication of how long debris remains in the water without degrading.

What a beautiful place Beveridge Reef is. The water colors are exquisite - a deep turquoise blue in the center of the lagoon, and a pale blue-green over the white sand shelf. On clear days with puffy white clouds overhead, the bottoms of the clouds are blue-green, reflecting the colors of the lagoon - a most unusual sight. So few boats visit here that it is incredibly unspoiled. The fish are so tame one can approach them within inches and they ignore you. In fact, when I jumped in the water right after we anchored a type of jack, about 5 lbs. in size, came up to investigate me practically brushing me. He startled me. More startling, though, is that he seemed to think that Watermelon was his own private reef, and we his friends. We named him George, and fed him whatever we could (he liked chicken a lot, but spit out the clams and bread). He swam with us, splashing us when we climbed off the boat into the dinghy, and was always there. Ridiculous to anthropomorphize a fish, but we couldn't bring ourselves to catch him and eat him.

Considering how dangerous an approach it is to this reef, the center is remarkably clear and safe. The coral heads on the sand shelf are widely scattered, so for almost the first time since we arrived in French Polynesia we were not worried about our chain fouling on coral. When I noticed a coral head that was sitting right on the slope between the 10' shelf and 40' lagoon I decided to snorkel over, and was initially rewarded with the incredible sight of a cloud of small bait fish swimming around and around in a tight ball. I hung back to watch the ballet. A group of five or six jacks swam into the school, and the ball of fish dented and contorted to let the jacks in and through. What a wonderful sight. My wonder was cut short when out from the bottom of the ball of fish came five or six medium-sized gray sharks to take a look at me. Since nobody is fishing here there is plenty of food for everyone so the sharks aren't hungry. Reef sharks wouldn't like the taste of me, I know, but they've been known to take a bite just to taste the new thing, or by accident, so I backed away from there most cautiously. Ten or fifteen feet away from them and I was out of sight and out of mind and back they went to the lunch wagon.

We take our wonder in small bits. Although there is no land here, the flat portion of the reef is as wide as a two-lane highway, with less than an inch of water over it at low tide, so it's really fun and interesting to walk on. On a calm day one stands facing the breakers crashing at your feet. Because the fish are so unafraid it's easy to get up close, and we see tiny fish that normally hide in the coral. The colors of the fish here are so intense - there's a pretty black fish with a clear bright orange spot on its tail. Another fish is chartreuse with a vertical blue, white and red stripe bisecting it. They brush past us self-importantly as we walk on the reef, and sometimes they have to swim on their sides to get from one pool to another at low tide. Enormous sting rays - they look like hover-craft - cruise the sand looking for clams and worms to eat, and one or two fish follow them around to catch the leavings as they rise up again to continue their hunt for food. White-tip reef sharks also cruise around looking for clams and other good things to eat. In general the white tip sharks are quite shy - they'll slither into a coral hole and just sit there, and if you go down to look more closely at them they'll swim away until you leave.

And a special wonder here: as we snorkeled we noticed individual fish, like drums, about one to two pounds in size, hovering over the sand, barely moving, but they didn't look like they were guarding a nest. What was so peculiar about them was that they'd suddenly disappear. Since the visibility of the water is between 50 and 100 feet, we couldn't figure out where they were going .... we were sure we'd see them if they swam away, no matter how fast they might be. But we never saw one swimming away. A mystery. So we kept our eye on one as we swam toward it, and were amazed to see it bury itself into the sand in an instant, leaving no trace of itself. We assume that it is a choice shark meal and thus the burying defense - now you see it, now you don't.

Peter says that I've told too many people how wonderful Beveridge is - since we got there seven other boats have used our coordinates to come in, and others are on the way. An Australian from the States and a single-hander from Hyannis, Mass., both of whom we had instructed about this place by radio, brought us fresh fruits and tomatoes. As Peter says, visiting yachties bringing the "natives" gifts (I gather we've become rather notorious with the other cruisers out here - we stayed in Beveridge for almost a month - nobody could believe it, [or understand it, I think]). We had fun. Between wreck salvage, shell collecting, snorkeling, and puttering, we kept pretty busy. We hadn't the heart to shoot the fish in the lagoon, they're so tame that it's no sport at all. Also, the sharks seem to feel that the fish in this lagoon are from their private pantry and confiscate those fish that others have shot. We aren't interested in tugs of war with sharks. Unfortunately, for some people the need to kill things is too necessary to their self-image to be suppressed even in this benign place.

We finally left Beveridge with the sour taste of the carnage being visited upon it by one of the yachties, who would go out with spear gun to shoot something just because it was too tame to hide from him. Out of boredom one day he and some friends started "monster" fishing, catching and, necessarily killing, one of the reef sharks just for the hell of it. Big fish (wahoo, tuna and dorado) sit outside the lagoon pass and are easily caught by the yachts as they enter the reef. These big fish are too much food for any one yacht, so it has been shared with all boats in the anchorage, obviating the necessity to catch the reef fish. So the fellow killing the groupers and sharks did so out of blood lust, not a need for food.

It was with a great deal of regret that we left Beveridge Reef, but we were running out of some necessities, such as toilet paper and butter (rather embarrassing to have allowed ourselves to run low), so we finally, after three days of saying good-bye to the other boats in the lagoon, set sail for the island of Niue, of which we had received some good reports. Only 135 miles west of Beveridge Reef, it was a perfect sail, and we arrived the next morning ready for civilization.