Rangiroa Yacht Charter

Rangiroa is very nearly too large to grasp from the deck. Its lagoon covers more than fifteen hundred square kilometres, enough to contain the whole island of Tahiti, and from an anchorage on one side the far rim is simply not there. The name means endless sky, and after a night at anchor the accuracy of it is hard to dispute.

Two passes cut the reef, and the northern one, Tiputa, is among the most celebrated dive sites in the Pacific. On the incoming tide the water pours through carrying grey reef sharks, hammerheads in season, manta rays, eagle rays and great schools of barracuda. A resident population of bottlenose dolphins works the mouth of the pass and regularly comes to play with divers, which cannot be arranged or promised, only waited for. From the shore, the same dolphins can often be watched surfing the standing waves.

Inside the reef, the Blue Lagoon on the western rim is a lagoon within a lagoon, a shallow pool of pale water enclosed by its own small ring of motu, with blacktip sharks in the shallows and seabirds nesting on the sand. The Sables Roses, at the far south-eastern corner, are beaches of genuinely pink coral sand, several hours away by tender and worth the day it takes.

Rangiroa also makes wine. Vines grow on a motu in pure coral sand and produce two harvests a year, which is either an eccentricity or a small miracle depending on the bottle. Provisioning is straightforward, the villages are welcoming, and the diving is world class.