“I want boobie, I want boobie”, said Alec, approaching Gabe as she sat on the beach.
“Oh, look Alec, Daddy is coming back”, said Gabe, pointing to two small kites on the horizon quickly gaining in size.
I shaded my eyes and looked out over the dark blue water. There they were, Andrew and David, leaving the white breakers of the reef behind, crossing the deep waters. They had only just gone out to kitesurf the wave breaking on the reef some distance off Tenia island where we were anchored. “Already?”, I said “that’s a bit weird. Maybe it’s too windy”.
“I want boobie”, insisted Alec, pawing at Gabe’s wetsuit, his voice rising. “I want boobie, I WANT BOOBIE”.
We were sitting on the beach looking out over the anchorage. The big kids were making sand sculptures at the edge of the water, shrieking loudly whenever the gently lapping waves would overturn a newly created wall. There were only a few boats on the anchorage; it was too windy for most people to want to sail around, let alone anchor off a flat, windswept island offering little protection against the prevailing wind. The strong breeze lent a chilly note to the air, and we were fully rugged up, wearing rash vests and wetsuits.
The kites came rapidly closer; they were now across the reef and into the flat waters of the lagoon surrounding Tenia.
“Looks like they want to land”, I said. “I’ll go over and help”.
Bracing myself by folding my arms across my chest I made my way around the sandspit, abandoning the windless comfort of the leeward side for the chill embrace of 25 knots of wind just around the corner. By the time I came to the sandspit, the sound of Alec’s cries for boobie were long drowned out by the roar of the wind. Andrew was already standing there, waiting for me to land the kite.
Making sand sculptures
“What happened?”, I shouted as he lowered the kite towards me. “Was it too gnarly out there?”.
“Shark”, he shouted. “It was a big shark. David saw it on the surface, and we didn’t want to hang around”.
I shuddered. New Caledonia was teeming with sharks; the French Protectorate had recorded 19 shark attacks since the year 2000, many of them with a fatal outcome. Most attacks were on spearfishers hauling around their bloody catch, but in 2011 a 15 year old kitesurfer had been killed by a tiger shark after losing his board in a pass not dissimilar to the one off Tenia – experts reckoned that the shark confused the boardless kiter with a bird.
“So, if you guys want to go…”, said Andrew. “It’s nice and flat in the lagoon”.
Right.
I guess the big sharks don’t come into the shallows, they hang around waiting for large pelagic fish to come swarming through the pass. The bottom in the lagoon was mainly coral; the tide was on its way down, but there was still enough water cover to kitesurf, as long as you didn’t lose your board and got dragged over the sharp coral. In any case I was wearing a wetsuit. And we had come here to kite. The weather was perfect, a six metre kite plenty of power.
“OK”, I said. “I’ll go tell Gabe, she’s just feeding Alec”.
Our friends from Raglan, Andy and Gabe, and their two children Vida and Alec, had arrived in New Caledonia the day before. After provisioning, we’d left Noumea in the afternoon for Ilot Maitre, a nearby island where we anchored overnight. We’d gotten up early in the morning to watch the France – New Zealand rugby match at the local resort, with a group of increasingly despondent Frenchmen. When the score approached 40-13 New Zealand-France, the man seated next to me threw his hands in the air, grabbed his cigarette packet and got up.
“C’est terrible”, he said. “Quelle horreur. I am so depressed. I go now.”
I smiled in sympathy. Behind us the children were chanting “Go the All Blacks, the All Blacks are winning, go the All Blacks”, interspersed with the odd request for boobie. I didn’t blame him for leaving – who would want your nose rubbed in your humiliating defeat by a bunch of kids?
After the rugby we’d sailed to Tenia, anchored, and swiftly made our way ashore to go kiting, David excited to finally go wave sailing after a while of only flat water. Only to have his waves ruined by a shark.
When doing anything in the ocean here, as in a lot of places where we’ve been, we are always aware that there could be sharks around. As long as we don’t see them it is easy to pretend that they are not there and bask around in the water feeling safe and secure, even though we know that we would be unlikely to see a predatory shark before it bites us, the surprise being a key element of their attack strategy. The feeling of safety vanishes completely when you see them, when you can no longer pretend that they are not there and the cocoon of imagined safety bursts. It would be crazy to ignore a shark once you’ve seen it, to stay in the water with a large predatory beast, even if we know logically that most victims of shark attacks never see their attacker. We’d snorkelled with reef sharks on our travels, but had we seen a bull shark, or a tiger shark, we would have jumped out faster than quick.
As it turned out, Gabe and I had a good time on the flat waters of the shallow lagoon, whizzing around on our six metre kites watching fish scatter to all sides as the shadow of the kite fell upon them, Alec staring forlornly out from the beach, waiting patiently for his boobies to return. We didn’t see any big sharks, only the gray shadows of small reef sharks cruising the sandy channels of between the magnificently coloured coral, the blues and purples and yellows and greens turning the lagoon into a blur of colours.
We stayed at Tenia for five days, the men managing to bravely / foolishly ignore the shark they had seen on the first day and return again and again to the break, having a ball on the wave. As the wind lessened over the course of the week, more kitesurfers and windsurfers appeared, but there was still plenty of space for us all in the vast lagoon.
The kids frolicked for days on end in the shallows, snorkelling the nearby reef, jumping off the kayak, making glue for sculptures out of liquified sand, Alec busily ferrying water from the sea to the sculpture factory for hours on end at the orders of the older children.
“We need more water, more water”, yelled Matias, who was busy mixing the sand.
“Water, more, water”, panted Alec, running as fast as he could on his little stumbly legs, tongue out, balancing his little water bottle in his hands, carefully emptying out water where instructed.
“We need more powder, get more powder”, shouted Vida from the nearby dune, her and Lukie busily grabbing tubberware full of soft, dry sand and running it down to the factory.
Thus occupied, the kids played for hours on end by the water’s edge, only interrupting their play to come eat – snacks of juicy pineapple, crackers and emmental, dried fruit, lunches of rice salads with parboiled haricots verts and crunchy cucumbers, or sandwiches, stuffed with french cheese and cerrano ham, fresh succulent tomatoes, crispy lettuce and French dijon mustard mayonnaise.
“I want boobie, I want boobie”, wailed Alec, not satisfied with the solid food, his voice rising with despair as he pushed away the proffered carrot sticks and orange wedges. “I want boobie, I WANT BOOBIE”.
The French know how to take care of and equip their deserted islands. Many of the little ilots dotting the lagoon are marine reserves, sporting pristine coral teeming with fish and turtles, dugongs hiding out in the deeper seagrass beds. Mooring buoys are provided in the ones closest to Noumea, making it easy for day boats and yachts to visit and reducing the damage done by anchoring. Compost toilets and fire pits with chained down picnic tables and fire grilles are scattered over the islands, and firewood is delivered daily or weekly depending on the number of visitors expected. It is free to camp here, and one could have an awesome, cheap camping holiday, kitesurfing and snorkelling, sleeping in zipped-up tents (to prevent warmth seeking seasnakes from entering) – all you would have to bring is food and water.
One evening on Tenia we had a bonfire in one of the firepits provided, feasting on French saucissons, crunchy salad and freshly roasted corn on the cobs, the kids piling into the dinghy in the dark to go back to the boat, full of sausages, sooty tribal patterns in their faces, sand in their hair.
Despite not seeing them for a year, it didn’t take Vida long to acclimatise to the boys.
“I LOVE Star Wars”, she said, after a briefing session watching excerpts from Movie III staged by the boys to familiarise her with their play. “The light sabres are SO cool”.
In the evening, before falling asleep, she would lie in her bed reading Matias’s Captain Underpants book, appearing freshly faced the next morning with quotes. “Pee on your socks for warmth, they changed the sign”, she chuckled, showing me a page in the book.
“Sorry, Gabe”, I said, “didn’t mean to introduce toilet humour to your family”.
“I want boobie, I WANT BOOBIE”, cried Alec somewhere in the background, distracting Gabe from a reply.
Once the wind died down a bit, we went back towards Noumea and stopped at Ilot Koue for a last day of kitesurfing. A tiny stretch of creamy sand scattered with white bleached corals and clinging succulent vegetation fighting to hold down the sand, Koue has only a few trees scattered on the raised platform of the centre of the island, and is surrounded by a turquoise lagoon fringed by a reef teeming with life, topped with a stretch of beautifully flat water to kite in a fresh seabreeze. The sun was fierce and the kids were splashing in the water as we took turns speeding across the shallows on our kite boards, just inches away from where the kids were peacefully playing in the shallows. At the end of a day there in the hot sun we were all red-faced and roasted, finally feeling warm after a week of chilly but enjoyable winds.
On our last day, a hot windless hazy morning, we went to Ilot Nge to show Vida the incredible sealife there. As we approached the mooring buoys through the glassy waters of the early morning we saw turtles and sharks, huge remora, giant trevally and large coral trouts gliding through the crystal clear waters. We soon went snorkelling, and Vida was ecstatic to see a turtle, snorkelling above it as it glid gracefully through the water just above the seabottom for hundreds of metres, weaving in and out of seagrass groves, stopping to visit small coral outcrops on its way away from the shadows following it around on the surface.
We celebrated our last night with a bonfire on the beach, roasting potatoes in the hot coals and chargrilling vegetables on a grille handily provided by the French authorities. The kids rummaged around the area and quickly turned into Indian savages, their faces covered in soot, feathers in their hair, bones and fish carcasses tied to their belts, fierce expressions on their faces, tent pegs in their hands as weapons, Alec’s facade the only one crumbling as the night wore on.
“I want boobie, I WANT boobie, I WANT BOOBIE”.
SV Bob The Cat 