Bonjour from Tahiti!

Bonjour from Tahiti!  So we got a little off course from our original plans of heading to Chile, but here we are!  And personally I’m enjoying every minute of the sunshine and crystal clear warm water!  We arrived on Sunday just after dark, spent that whole night pulling watches until daylight so we could motor into the lagoon.  We dropped anchor in front of Marina Taina around 6:30am, met with the agent who is helping us check in and out of the country and were eating ice cream by 11am!  The first time in many years I was thankful and excited for a McDonalds, yummm  McFlurry! Marine Taina is about 7 miles down the coast from the city of Papeete.  The marina conveniently boasts TWO bars (well restaurants really, but all we noticed was the tap behind the bar) which we made good use of,  and laundry services (equally as important!) It is also within walking distance of the Mcdonalds and grocery stores.  Since all of French Polynesia speaks well, French I have gotten to put my extremely rusty French speaking skills to the test.  Really not working out as well as I would like, but much better than expected. We plan on taking the next few days to get the boat sorted out and cleaned from our passage before we really start exploring the island.  The only real damper on spending so much time in the tropics is no amount of sunscreen can save me from the sunburn I’m currently sporting.  Kevin tans, I turn red, okay REALLY red.

Although not everything that could have gone wrong on our passage did, but it sure felt like it.  Note: Mom if you are reading this you might want to scroll through this paragraph. 

Passage notes: I will start with the reason we aborted our mission to Chile. After leaving New Zealand, we had great sailing for 2 days I think, then we got gales, one direction then a 12 hour break, and then from another direction. After about 10 days of this a significant amount of free-play began to develop between the rudder and tiller. About all we could really do was monitor the situation, which after every gale was a little bit worse.  Knowing the long passage to Chile would be gales as often as not, and because the situation was deteriorating during every gale we decided it would be best to search out lighter air, and a port where we can make any repairs that may be necessary.  That is the big issue, we are currently working on that problem and hoping it doesn’t cost too much! Now the rest of the casualty list: solar panels, wind generator, freshwater pump, single sideband radio,  even my hair clippers quit! The fridge quit, oh wait, we didn’t have one of those when we left new Zealand, damn. While drifting around waiting for daylight and contemplating the list of things that broke in a few short weeks I was thankful to be somewhere that would have all the items necessary to make repairs, and was happy to know that nothing more should break in the mile between the pass and where we anchored. That is until we dropped the anchor, shift into reverse, pay out rode…oh wait, reverse? What happened, we’re not going backwards, Shit. Launch dinghy, tow boat backwards to set anchor, done. Our electrical problems were all caused by corrosion, which has to happen eventually on a small boat, it just happened all at once to us, but everything can be fixed. We will be working on those items, and enjoying Tahiti since we are here. We will not be sailing for Chile this season, by the time we make all our repairs, we will be too late in the season to actually get to Chile and have any time to cruise. The good news is that I don’t think it is going anywhere, so we will be able to sail there another time.

It might sound like the passage from hell, and in some regards it was, but overall we had a good time. We had a few days of nice weather that we could enjoy being outside, and were going in the right direction. We even caught a few fish, on all 4 days I was able to even attempt fishing! The first one was a nice Albacore. We had been becalmed overnight, and in the morning there was a school of baitfish under the boat, which soon became a school of albacore. Next fish was a nice mahimahi that hit late in the evening, and while it was fun to catch, and it was a beautiful fish we couldn’t be bothered to clean a fish in the dark, and try and preserve it somehow. We prefer to keep only meal sized fish! The third and last fish was also a mahimahi, but this one was really big, and we quick-released him to save having a monster fish thrashing around the cockpit. So given the conditions we had we were happy to catch a few fish, which was more than we expected. The new wind vane performed as well as we had hoped for, but as the free-play problem increased the wind vane performance decreased, but there wasn’t anything we could do about that. We saw and heard no other traffic during our passage, but we passed the island of Rurutu in the Austral group, and while we didn’t get too close we did enjoy the view of a beautiful tropical island for the day.  Another couple of thousand miles have now passed under our keel, and we are happy to have arrived safely somewhere!(Tahiti isn’t the worst place in the world to be stuck in)