Fatu Hiva rises out of the South Pacific like something out of a dream: green spires wrapped in cloud; the Bay of Virgins cutting a near-perfect crescent into black volcanic rock; waterfalls dropping straight into the anchorage. It is, by wide consensus among the cruisers who make it this far into the Marquesas, one of the most beautiful landfalls on earth. Every one of us who has dropped anchor there has photos to prove it, and stories to match.
What fewer of us think about, on our way back out to sea, is what it means to actually live on Fatu Hiva. There is no hospital. There is no ambulance you can call for a fast response. When something goes seriously wrong, “remote and wild” stops being a romantic description and becomes a logistical, and sometimes medical, emergency.
Earlier this year, it became exactly that for one Fatu Hiva family.
Looking down at Hanavave, where Poi Reva and his family live
Many cruisers who have passed through Fatu Hiva will know Poi Reva, who guides visitors around the island by 4×4, sharing its valleys, its history, and its people with anyone who turns up by boat. Late one afternoon, Poi’s nine-year-old son was in the water with a group of children at the small harbour, playing as the local kids do most afternoons. A shark came in fast. The other children got out in time — his son was a few seconds too slow.
The shark took his right leg first. He fought it off with his left foot, and the shark released one leg only to take hold of the other. His older brother reached him before anyone else could. Poi got him into the car and drove to the first aid station.
That’s where the geography of Fatu Hiva turned an already terrible afternoon into something worse. The medical helicopter that could have reached them couldn’t fly at night. So the family went by speedboat instead — four hours across open water to Hiva Oa, arriving at 10:30pm to firefighters and a waiting clinic. The next day, a helicopter to Nuku Hiva, where a surgeon took over. He had lost a great deal of blood. From there, on to Tahiti.
The young boy survived. He is going to need a long road of care ahead: a nerve graft, months of rehabilitation, and — just as real, though less visible — the psychological work of a nine-year-old coming to terms with what happened to him in a place he’d swum his whole life. Poi says his son has changed since the attack, and that he’s not easy to reach right now. He used to live for football. That, too, is part of what he’s lost, at least for now. He is walking again, though hampered by the damage. Back at school, with a long recovery ahead for him.
A friend of the family has set up a GoFundMe to help with his ongoing treatment and rehabilitation: https://gofund.me/27789d1ef [1]
This is where I’d ask BCA members to pause for a moment before deciding this isn’t their story. Most of us who cruise in remote areas arrive as guests in places that are extraordinarily generous to us. Guides like Poi who share their island, families who sell us fruit or invite us to a meal, communities with none of the safety net we take for granted at home. We take the beauty. We post the photos. It’s also worth asking what we leave behind.
Left: A view of the mountains surrounding Hanavave; Right: The harbour where the attack took place.
Nobody is asking for pity for Fatu Hiva, and nobody there wants to be treated as a charity case rather than as the people who make this cruising ground what it is. What this family is asking for is straightforward: help with the real cost of a child’s recovery, from people who came through their island and were welcomed there. That doesn’t require reframing the Marquesas as a place of danger — it’s a place of both extraordinary beauty and real vulnerability, and those two things sit side by side for the people who live there year-round, long after our anchor is up.
If you’ve anchored anywhere remote, or in the Bay of Virgins, taken a tour, bought fruit from a roadside stand, or simply been moved by how far out of their way local people went to make you feel welcome, this is a chance to return a small part of that. Consider making a donation, and consider sharing this with others in the fleet who’ve been there too.