French Polynesia occupies an area of the South Pacific roughly the size of Western Europe, scattered across 118 islands and atolls divided into five archipelagos. For a charter yacht it presents two distinct propositions: the Society Islands, where volcanic peaks rise from turquoise lagoons and the sailing is settled and spectacular, and the Tuamotu atolls, where flat rings of coral hold some of the most extraordinary diving on earth. The best itineraries include both. The logistics are manageable, and the contrast - between the lush, vertical drama of Bora Bora and the flat, remote, elemental character of Fakarava - is part of what makes a French Polynesia charter memorable.
The charter hub for the Society Islands is Raiatea, 230 kilometres northwest of Tahiti. All the main charter operators base their fleets there, and the anchorage at Uturoa has the provisioning infrastructure to set a boat up for two weeks without returning to Tahiti. The Tuamotos require a longer passage - Fakarava is roughly 450 kilometres northeast of Tahiti - and are usually incorporated into extended itineraries of three weeks or more, or visited as a dedicated passage from Tahiti.
The Society Islands: The Core Circuit
The Leeward Islands - the western group of the Society Islands comprising Raiatea, Taha’a, Bora Bora, Huahine, and the more remote Maupiti - form the standard Society Islands charter circuit. From Raiatea, the distances are manageable: 24 nautical miles upwind to Huahine, 22 nautical miles downwind to Bora Bora, with Taha’a and Raiatea sharing the same lagoon. The trade winds blow consistently from the east, which means most legs of the circuit sail downwind on at least one tack, and passages of four to five hours are the norm.
Bora Bora
The most photographed island in French Polynesia and, on arrival by boat, one of the few that fully lives up to its reputation. Mount Otemanu - 727 metres of basalt rising from the lagoon - is visible from well offshore on the approach, and the quality of the water inside the coral reef, in shades of turquoise and cobalt that shift with depth and cloud cover, justifies every photograph you have ever seen. The mooring field west of Motu Toopua is the preferred overnight position for charter yachts, offering shelter and one of the better views of the mountain.
The charter activity on the water in Bora Bora centres on the lagoon itself. The strip of shallows running from the main island toward the northern motus - sometimes called the Valley of Eagle Rays - consistently produces encounters with eagle rays feeding over the sand. The southern end of the lagoon, around the Lagoonarium, holds resident blacktip reef sharks and green turtles in the shallows alongside the coral. Neither of these is a dive operation; both are accessible by snorkelling from the dinghy.
The manta ray encounters that make Bora Bora’s lagoon famous require a bit of timing. The mantas are present year-round but feed on plankton blooms that concentrate in certain parts of the lagoon depending on wind and current. Local guides at the Matira Point end of the island run morning excursions - typically in outrigger canoes - to wherever recent sightings have been reported. A private charter with a good skipper and local knowledge can position the boat near the same areas without the group excursion format.
Bora Bora is the most tourist-developed island in the circuit, with the overwater bungalow resorts that have defined the island’s global image for fifty years. For a charter group this means the practical services - provisions, water, fuel, restaurant meals ashore - are well established. The luxury hotels on the motus welcome visiting yachts for dinner reservations made in advance.
Taha’a
So close to Raiatea that both islands share the same barrier reef and lagoon, Taha’a is everything Bora Bora is not: quiet, barely developed, and strongly scented - literally - with vanilla. The island produces around 80 per cent of French Polynesia’s vanilla crop, and the farms running up the valleys are accessible via dinghy and a short walk from almost any anchorage on the island’s west coast.
The coral gardens off the motus on Taha’a’s northwest tip - particularly Motu Ceran and Motu Tautau - are the best snorkelling in the Leeward Islands for anyone who is not making the Tuamotu passage for diving. The clarity is exceptional, the coral health is high, and the marine life - Napoleon wrasse, parrotfish, rays drifting over the sand - is present at snorkelling depth without a tank. The motu beaches themselves are everything the charter brochure photographs suggest: empty, white, and fringed by the kind of palm tree that looks like it was placed there deliberately.
The passage from Taha’a west to Bora Bora - roughly 15 nautical miles, downwind, through the Punaeroa Pass - is one of the finer afternoon sails in the Pacific. The light on the Bora Bora peaks on a clear afternoon is worth planning the day around.
Raiatea
The largest of the Leeward Islands and the spiritual and historical heart of French Polynesia - by legend, the birthplace of the gods and the origin point of the Polynesian migrations that populated Hawaii, New Zealand, and the Cook Islands. The evidence of this is not mythological: the Marae Taputapuatea, a UNESCO World Heritage Site on the southeast coast, is the most important ancient temple complex in the Pacific, a large open-air platform of coral stone used for centuries by chiefs and priests from across Polynesia. It is accessible by dinghy, with mooring off Hotopuu Bay, and worth the half-day detour from the sailing.
The practical appeal of Raiatea for a charter is the Faaroa River - the only navigable river in French Polynesia - which cuts into the island’s interior through dense tropical vegetation. Kayaking or taking the dinghy (engine off; the park rules require it past a certain point) several kilometres upriver into the valley is a different experience from anything else on the Leeward Islands circuit, and the botanical garden at the river’s navigable limit is worth landing for.
Huahine
The most visited of the Leeward Islands by charter yachts is frequently Bora Bora; the most genuinely remote-feeling is Huahine. The island is actually two islands - Huahine Nui and Huahine Iti, connected by a small bridge - with a pace of life that has not been significantly altered by the decades of tourism that reshaped Bora Bora. The village of Fare on the north coast is the kind of place where the charter crew goes for baguettes in the morning and ends up having lunch.
Avea Bay on the south coast of Huahine Iti is the headline anchorage: a wide, well-protected bay with a reef on the eastern side that produces some of the better snorkelling encounters in the Leewards, including reliable manta ray sightings along the sand edge at the bay’s southern point. The holding is good, the bay rarely crowds (though this changes in the July-August peak season), and the Relais Mahana restaurant on the beach above the reef serves dinner at anchor on a boat schedule rather than a resort schedule.
Huahine’s interior - fish traps in the river channels, ancient marae scattered through the rainforest, vanilla and melon plantations - rewards a day on the island rather than purely on the water. The sacred eels at the Marae Anini are an easy stop on any vehicle tour of the island.
Maupiti
The westernmost and least-visited island in the Leeward Islands group, Maupiti sits 40 kilometres west of Bora Bora and is separated from the charter circuit by a pass - the Onoiau Pass - that is narrow, shallow, and dangerous in swell from the southwest. When conditions allow the entry, the reward is an island where the lagoon clarity is exceptional, the snorkelling is among the best in the Society Islands, and the anchorage inside the barrier reef is occupied almost entirely by charter yachts rather than the resorts that have no presence here. The island is too small and the pass too restrictive for commercial development to have arrived in any significant form.
Maupiti is a good two-day extension for a three-week itinerary. For shorter charters, the pass entry conditions and the transit back to Raiatea need to be factored carefully against the weather.
The Tuamotu Atolls: Fakarava and the Shark Passes
The Tuamotu Archipelago is the largest chain of coral atolls in the world - 78 atolls stretching 1,500 kilometres across the Pacific - and for a charter yacht it represents a complete change of character from the Society Islands. There are no mountains. The highest point on most atolls is a metre or two above sea level, the terrain a narrow ring of coconut palms, casuarina trees, and occasional settlement enclosing a vast internal lagoon. The sailing between atolls is open-ocean passage-making rather than lagoon island-hopping. And the diving - particularly in the passes that connect the lagoon to the ocean - is some of the finest available anywhere in the Pacific.
Fakarava
The second-largest atoll in the Tuamotus, 60 kilometres long and 25 kilometres wide, with a lagoon six times the area of Washington D.C. and a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve designation covering it and six neighbouring atolls. The atoll has two passes connecting the lagoon to the ocean: the Garuae Pass in the north and the Tumakohua Pass in the south. Both are world-class drift dives. Together they represent the primary reason serious divers route their French Polynesia charter through the Tuamotus.
Garuae Pass is the widest navigable pass in French Polynesia - 1,600 metres across, dived on a slack or incoming tide when the current running through the channel concentrates marine life on the reef walls. The scale is different from the south pass: the width means you can barely see from one wall to the other, and the marine life - grey reef sharks, tuna, large schools of barracuda, manta rays working the wall for plankton - is distributed through a volume of water that rewards the drift. The hard coral reef flanking the channel is dense and healthy, a product of the nutrient-rich current feeding it daily.
Tumakohua Pass in the south is narrower, wilder, and more intense. Hundreds of grey reef sharks aggregate in the pass, using the tidal current in the same way soaring birds use thermals - the upwelling counteracts their negative buoyancy, allowing them to hold position in the channel with minimal effort. On peak days, the aggregation reaches 500 to 700 animals. They are not hunting during daylight hours; they are resting and thermoregulating. The experience of drifting through them - the sharks stacked in the water column below you, moving in slow formation as the current carries you forward - is difficult to describe to anyone who has not done it. It is frequently cited as the defining dive of divers who have spent decades underwater across multiple ocean basins.
The Tumakohua Pass also hosts the annual grouper spawning event, which occurs on the full moon in June and July. Marbled grouper aggregate in the pass in their hundreds in the days before the moon, then spawn simultaneously on the night of the full moon as the outgoing tide begins - pairs separating from the school to rise and release and fertilise eggs in a sequence that continues through the night. The sharks that are present in the pass on normal days multiply for this event, arriving to feed on the distracted grouper. It is one of the most documented mass spawning events in the ocean and one of the few that remains genuinely accessible to recreational divers.
Both passes require drift diving experience and comfort in current. Dive centres in Fakarava check certifications seriously, and they are right to do so. The passes are not beginner territory. Charter groups with mixed experience levels can arrange for experienced divers to dive the passes with guides while non-divers or less experienced divers snorkel the lagoon interior, which is exceptional in its own right - flat, clear to 30 metres, with Napoleon wrasse, blacktip reef sharks, and green turtles in the shallows around the motus.
The south end of the atoll, around the old village of Tetamanu, is accessible by boat from the north (roughly 90 minutes from the main village of Rotoava) or as an overnight anchorage for a charter yacht positioned at the Tumakohua Pass for early-morning diving. The village itself - coral church built in 1874, decommissioned school, two small dive-orientated guesthouses - is one of the most genuinely remote and evocative places in the Pacific. Anchoring off Tetamanu with no other yachts in sight is the kind of experience that the Society Islands, for all their beauty, cannot deliver.
Rangiroa
The largest atoll in the Tuamotus and the second largest in the world, Rangiroa’s lagoon is so large that the far side is over the horizon. The two main passes - Tiputa and Avatoru - are the other headline drift diving locations in the Tuamotus, offering similar concentrations of grey reef sharks, dolphins that ride the incoming tidal bore, hammerheads in season, and the napoleon wrasse that reach sizes here - as big as a small car, as one experienced guide put it - that are not seen elsewhere in the Pacific.
Rangiroa is more developed than Fakarava, with a larger village and more established dive operations, and the Blue Lagoon - a sheltered inner lagoon at the western end of the atoll, reached by dinghy through a gap in the reef, its water an extraordinary cobalt blue from the depth of the sand below - is the kind of anchorage that charter crews return to. For a Tuamotu itinerary, dividing the time between Fakarava and Rangiroa gives both the more intense Fakarava shark diving and Rangiroa’s greater variety of sites and the Blue Lagoon experience.
Tikehau
A smaller atoll between Fakarava and Rangiroa, less visited than either, with a pink sand beach on the northern motu that appears in every French Polynesia photography guide. The diving is centred on the main pass and the lagoon, which holds manta ray cleaning stations at 15 metres where the rays hover above coral heads while cleaner wrasses remove parasites - long enough to observe, calm enough to photograph. For a charter itinerary that has already dived the major passes at Fakarava and Rangiroa, Tikehau is the quiet addition that provides contrast.
How to Structure the Itinerary
The standard Society Islands circuit from Raiatea - Taha’a, Bora Bora, Huahine, back to Raiatea - fits comfortably in seven to ten days. Three weeks is the minimum to add a Tuamotu passage without rushing: roughly a week in the Society Islands, a three to four day offshore passage to Fakarava, a week in the Tuamotus, and the passage back.
The offshore passage to the Tuamotus is open-ocean sailing in trade wind conditions - typically 25 to 30 knots on the beam, some swell, genuinely blue-water. It is excellent sailing for a group that wants more than lagoon island-hopping. The atolls are low-lying and require careful navigation on approach, particularly at night, which most delivery skippers will not attempt. Plan the approach for daylight with a well-rested crew.
Fakarava’s north pass (Garuae) is used as the entry to the lagoon; charter yachts anchor in the inner lagoon near Rotoava and take day trips or transit to the south for overnight Tumakohua diving. From Fakarava, the options are Tikehau (80 kilometres), Rangiroa (70 kilometres from Tikehau), and the passage back to Tahiti (450 kilometres) for the flight home.
The key variable is wind direction on the return. The Tuamotus are downwind of Tahiti on the prevailing trades, which means the return passage is to windward. Plan for this; it is manageable but not the same sail as the outbound passage.
If you are building a French Polynesia itinerary for a group that includes serious divers - particularly anyone whose primary motivation is the Fakarava passes - talk to our team early. The timing for the Tumakohua grouper spawning, the dive certifications required, and the specific charter boats suitable for the offshore passage to the Tuamotus all need to be factored at the planning stage, not after arrival.
The charter circuit through the Society Islands is exceptional and complete in itself. The Tuamotus are for the group that wants to understand why French Polynesia has a claim on being the most remarkable diving destination in the Pacific.
French Polynesia uses the CFP franc. French is the official language; most people in the charter industry and tourist services speak English. The Tuamotu atolls have very limited resupply options - provision the yacht fully in Raiatea or Papeete before making the passage. Fakarava has a small supermarket in Rotoava; supplies at Tetamanu are limited to what the guesthouses stock. Sharks are fully protected in French Polynesia and have been since 2006.