Around Rarotonga by boat

This video is of a journey around Rarotonga on board the charter game fishing boat the Akura.
This wasn’t a fishing trip however; Akura was the spectator vessel during the Vaka Eiva outrigger canoe festival in November last year and I was lucky enough to get a ride for the mixed round Rarotonga V6 relay, thanks to Cook Islands News.
You might spot the occasional vaka in the video but this one is really about travelling around the island in an anticlockwise direction, starting and ending at Avatiu harbour. (For more of the canoes see the Vaka Eiva 2011 video here.)I used to get seasick just looking at waves and small boats are notoriously unstable both for shooting video and for people with queasy stomachs. Dramamine cured the queasy stomach problem but the boat, the camera and me pitched, rolled and yawed our way around Raro and the video makes this quite clear. People with a delicate disposition be warned!

Avatiu – small harbour, big fish

Avatiu harbour, with its background of bush-clad volcanic hills, looks very peaceful and attractive on a sunny summer day. It will look better when the harbour works are finished – at the moment the eastern, main harbour is being re-developed; lengthened and straightened out I think.
There’s still a bit of a dog-leg at the seaward end and piles of large rocks on the foreshore (ammunition for the next cyclone?)
The western end is still in use though. That’s where game fishing boats, sailboats and other recreational craft hang out. The dive boats load and unload here as well.
The water’s pretty clean and deep enough to shelter some large fish.
The ones in the video are trevally. The game fishers catch these when they are out at sea but I hope they all leave these two alone as they’re much more interesting to look at swimming around than they would be served up on a plate.