Austral Yacht Charter

The Austral Islands lie south of everything else, strung along a submarine ridge running towards the cooler latitudes of the Pacific. Fewer than seven thousand people live across the whole group, and visiting yachts are rare enough to be remembered. This is French Polynesia with the temperature turned down and the crowds removed entirely.

The climate is the first thing you notice. Winters are genuinely fresh, the light is clearer and harder than in the north, and the vegetation shifts from coconut to pine, taro terraces and market gardens. Tubuai and Rurutu supply much of Tahiti’s produce, and the islands keep a settled agricultural rhythm quite unlike the resort economies further west.

Between July and October the Australs become one of the finest places on earth to encounter humpback whales. Having crossed from Antarctic feeding grounds, the animals calve and rest in sheltered water close inshore, particularly off Rurutu, where the drop-off comes near enough to the coast that a mother and calf may pass within metres of a tender. Few regulated sites anywhere offer an encounter this intimate.

Rurutu itself is a raised coral island, its ancient reef lifted clear of the sea and carved into limestone cliffs and caverns hung with stalactites. Raivavae, further east, is different again: a jagged green interior enclosed by a turquoise lagoon and a chain of white-sand motu, an island regularly described as the most beautiful in the Pacific by people who have seen a great many of them.

Come to the Australs for the space, for the whales, and for the sense of an archipelago that remains entirely its own.