Exploring Raiatea and Taha'a (Part I)

<i>The "Exploring XYZ…" series is our attempt to remember everything we can about the anchorages and stops we make, mostly to benefit cruisers who follow us in future years. We anticipate folding this information into a wiki or Soggy Paws compendium as soon as possible. In the meantime, please feel free to ask questions; If we can remember, we'll share. GPS marks are for reference only. If you use them for navigation and hit something, it's not my fault.</i>

With teeth and outboard resolved, Don Quixote moves back into our more typical gypsy mode. We move anchorages almost daily, dipping into and out of baies, passes, and reefs to test the waters. Serendipity has brought us together with Ceildyh for this section of our voyages ensuring that we have good company for most of our adventures. Like us, they seem willing to change anchorages frequently dependent on mode, luck, and boat breakage. They also like rum cocktails, which is a helpful lubricant to good relations.

Raiatea and Taha'a are actually two islands which share a single barrier reef. The gap between reef and islands is unusually wide, frequently enabling boats to sail from point to point behind the reef. The novelty of sailing once again in light breezes with absolutely no wind or swell is appealing to the entire family. We find ourselves attempting to sail everywhere which can sometimes get a bit ridiculous as we tack back and forth quite literally caught between a rock and a hard place. Raiatea is the larger and southern of the two islands and boasts the second largest town in the Societies -- a whopping 5,000 people. Despite the small size, Uturoa boasts two grocery stores and a farmers market as well as hardware stores worthy of the name. In fact, many boats choose to complete their final provisioning on Raiatea as the selection is as great as Bora Bora and many report that the prices are considerably cheaper.

Our first days on Raiatea were spent at the Raiatea Carenage. This is a haul out and careening facility found on the north west end of Raiatea, all the way around the corner past the airport and the Tahiti Yacht Charter base. If available, you can pick up a CNI yellow mooring ball for roughly $15USD (1300 CFP) per night. We never saw a ball available. The anchorage in front of the facilities is just awful. Steep to and rocky, it's hard to find a shallow spot and even harder to set the hook. There is considerably better anchorage across the channel and on the reef to the west. We couldn't take advantage of it, however, as our problem was a dinghy motor. The last thing we wanted to do was row over a mile across the channel in 20 knot winds. Ceildyh was very happy with the quality of the sailmaker they found at the charter marina just around the corner, we were reasonably convinced that the outboard mechanique knows what he's doing. The facility consists of multiple buildings all housed on the same bit of land. It looks like you could have virtually any type of boat work done by someone in that yard. The only issue is unless you bring your own parts, anything that needs fixing with speciality bits and pieces is likely going to have to come from Papeete before it can be grafted to your vessel. The haul out is on rails rather than a lift and apparently can accommodate fairly large vessels, including catamarans. The posted prices on the web site are extremely competitive, almost scarily so. Hard to imagine why it is cheaper to haul on Raiatea than in Mexico.

As is the case with many Polynesian islands, there is no bus service on Raiatea and only one taxi. The taxi actually isn't a taxi; It's a guy with a truck who sells his time and services for obscene amounts of money as a "tour guide". He will "tour" you from the carenage to downtown for a price that makes you consider buying a scooter as a viable economic alternative. Every time we end up in a situation like this -- far from anywhere with no buses or cabs -- we vow that on our next cruise we will travel with bikes. The good news is that Polynesians are friendly and fully cognizant of the limitations of their public transit system. While you will never see one of them hitchhiking, they are very willing to scoop up the wayward cruiser and drop them in town. Our 'lift' came from a really friendly guy named Steve (whose car smelled like gardinia) who not only took Jaime and I into town, he stopped, got out, and guided us down the street and up the dark stair case to our dentist. He was afraid (rightfully so!) we wouldn't have found it otherwise. He introduced us to the receptionist, with whom not surprisingly he was on a first name basis, and made sure we were all settled into the waiting room, before he returned to his vehicle.

Escaping the carenage, we spent a night in Baie d'Haamene. The bay cuts deeply into the heart of Taha'a and makes two jinks before terminating in a lovely, shallow and mud filled bay (S16 38.238 W151 29.157). The protection from waves and wind is so complete and the holding so good that this bay is considered a hurricane hole. DrC and I estimate it has the capacity to shelter at least twice as many vessels as Puerto Don Juan up in the Bay of LA (call it maybe 60) with potentially better protection. For us, the bay was a much needed respite after nearly two weeks in a 20 to 30 knot wind tunnel. For the first time in what felt like forever, the wind generator stopped it's whinging and we slept like the dead with no movement and utter silence.

(continued Part II)

Underway at Night

Some people sleep through night passages. They do this through the simple expedient of believing that the ocean is super big, and the probability of their hitting anything is very small. Single handers (who have no choice) and super optimistic others (who have a choice but like risk a bit more than we do) will set an alarm every 15 minutes or so, scan the horizon, check the radar, then drift back to sleep. Some even more thick folks have several glasses of wine with dinner before doing this.

On Don Quixote, we have the luxury of having someone awake, at the helm, all the time. At night, we are even more cautious than during the day as we assume someone else is ignoring the horizon, the little navigation lights on the front of our boat, the ping on their radar, and the incredibly loud sound of our air horn when we try to get their attention. We have reason to believe this is a Good Policy. Close calls between two boats at night at sea are not like horseshoes and hand grenades, they are more like nuclear bombs; Even being within sight of the flash is too close. During our years cruising, we have had our share of "two ships passing in the night." With the South Pacific crossing, we are statistically underway a much greater proportion of the time and so find this happening more frequently.

Night encounters seem to fall into roughly five basic categories: Behemoth, Ghost, Panga, Misplaced Lighthouse, and Yachtie. Let's take these in order.

A behemoth is a boat so damn big that hitting you is tantamount to a 16-wheeler smacking into a mosquito while crossing Minnesota. You and your boat will barely make a smear on the bow. If it happens off watch or at night, they might not even know they've hit you. Behemoths include tankers, cargo containers, and cruise ships. The bad news is that frequently, no one is paying the slightest attention on the helm. The good news is that virtually all behemoths are visible from many miles away, and legally all of them are required to broadcast over AIS their position, bearing, and name. Basically, your job is to spot them well in advance and get out of their way as quickly as possible.

A ghost is a return on your radar or a light on the horizon that doesn't respond when you call. Sometimes ghosts even disappear after you hail them. Ghosts come in many sizes, and it's pretty fair to assume that all of them are doing something illegal. While some are drug runners, by far the majority are poachers illegally fishing out of internationally established seasons or in prohibited locations. Alternatively, they are simply a product of your exhausted imagination. I hate ghosts. They scare the heck of me, particularly when they disappear off the radar. I don't like the fact that a well lit boat with a hard return on my radar less than 2 miles away suddenly disappears when I try to establish whether I will pass them on port or starboard. After the ghost disappears, you just have to assume they have full responsibility for avoiding a collusion.

Pangas are small, hard bottomed fishing boats. Technically, pangas are a very specific brand, size, and conformation. However, we've come to use the term to refer to any idiot fisherman or pearl farmer out in the middle of the night without lights in a very small boat. To make these guys even more fun and interesting, they inevitably trail strings of nets, lines, and other assorted crap in the water, also unmarked. Generally, they are too small to show up on your radar. The way they signal their existence is to shine a flashlight at you… assuming they see you… assuming they are even awake. The bad news about pangas is that they are a serious navigational hazard which can cause tremendous damage to your boat. The good news is that they are not really offshore craft. As a rule, you can assume that if you are 30 or more miles off shore, the only panga you'll encounter is someone who is dire need of a rescue. Pangas are yet one more excellent reason to avoid sailing at night near any land mass. The really dangerous part of sailing across an ocean, remember, is the hard bits on the edges.

On our boat, we call it a misplaced lighthouse when we see a light somewhere that makes not the slightest bit of sense. This sobriquet started the night Jaime and I spotted a lighthouse about 1000 miles off the coast of Mexico. It was very tall, rotated on a regular periodic schedule, and scared the bejesus out of both of us. We pulled out both electronic charts and the hard copy to make sure we were not encountering some hitherto unstudied island in the middle of nowhere. If you've ever visited an atoll, this notion is substantially more plausible. However, in this case, we have no idea what we were seeing. It was probably a ghost, actually. But I swear it looked like a lighthouse. We also call random lights in channels, along shorelines, and in the middle of nowhere misplaced lighthouses. We see few of them in French Polynesia, but the Mexican coastline is speckled with such lights which have broken from their moorings and drifted hither and yon.

And finally, there are your friends, neighbors and fellow travelers, the yachties. Honestly, these guys are sometimes the most dangerous bunch of all. You'd think given the size of the oceans and the relatively tiny wetted surface of the average sailing or motor yacht, it would be impossible to bump into another boat in the middle of nowhere. Yet it happens all the time! The only boat we've routinely had on our horizon has been our buddy boat, but over sundowners on the decks of fellow cruisers, we hear all sorts of first person encounters with yachts at sea. Of course, the most dangerous type harken back to the first paragraph of this essay -- the ones that are asleep. Alternatively, they might be below reading a book or watching a movie, secure in the perfection of their signaling radar, auto-pilot and charts. We on Don Quixote are a bit old school. We don't really trust our charts, we definitely don't trust our radar or the alarms programmed into it. We trust our eyes and our ears, and when the adults start to get sleepy, we willingly sacrifice our children to the cause and stick them up on the helm for the night.

Night watch can be some of the most beautiful, introspective, and meditative part of your passage making. Just make sure that you are on watch to enjoy it, as well as to avoid the chance of anything going bump in the night.

Distance is Relative

It's 2005. We've owned Don Quixote a mere two months. We would like to take her north to La Connor to show her off to DrC's parents. The girls want to visit their grandparents, and it seems like a great opportunity to practice sailing our new boat. The problem is that the trip is really really long. The 50 some odd miles are utterly daunting. So we break the trip into three days up, two days in La Connor, three days for the return. Even so, the 20 mile day to Everett is nearly overwhelming leaving the entire family limp with exhaustion.

It's 2007. What with closing down the practice, renting the house, and getting the boat ready, we just don't have a full week to spend on a trip to Grandma and Grandpa. We reconsider and recalculate and commit to leaving early and have long days. We can manage the distance two days each way. Thanks to some friends of ours, we've learned the wonders of using Puget Sound tides to carry us from place to place. The second, 27 mile day is hard on everyone and boring in the extreme, but we do it.

It's 2008. We cut the lines on our cruising lives and head north. We make it all the way to Port Townsend, 45 miles north, in one day push to make a scheduled appointment with a rigger. It takes all day. On arrival, we have the devil's own time docking as the family has collectively less than a single erg of energy. As the stars start to emerge from Northwest clouds, we drag ourselves down to the local microbrewery to eat burgers and drink crafted and ginger brew with a sense of accomplishment. 

It's 2009. To escape the heat and mud of Santa Rosalia after Hurricane Jimena, the girls and I pull out of the harbor in the middle of the night and motor sail 65 north to Bahia San Franciscito. We don't even have the captain on board. It takes 13 hours, and we arrive before sunset with plenty of time to set the hook well for the night. The next day we duplicate the effort to get up and around the corner into the Bay of LA region where presumably we are out of the possible path of another hurricane. I can't remember us at any time discussing the distance, as the trip was well within "our wheelhouse" and a hell of a lot easier than the days just spent on the dock in 70 to 90 knot winds.

It's 2011. The family is noodling over the charts covering the region from the Societies to Tonga. Jaime notes, "Aitutaki to Palmerston North is only 193. We can leave in the morning and get in the next evening." Aeron nods, "Easy peasy." Mera adds, "Only one night watch per person." 

I try to imagine this family back in the Puget Sound. Have we really changed so much? If we wanted to see Grandma and Grandpa, would we really consider leaving on Friday afternoon back on Sunday? The family is busy making plans for this summer in New Zealand with trips to the Bay of Islands and Hauraki Gulf, both of which are 100s of miles from our base in Auckland Harbor. Presumably, there will come a time when 100 miles seems like a long day again. But today, we are sailing from Huahine to Raiatea, and we don't even bother to plan when to leave or arrive. The trip is so short, it's hardly worth changing the daily cooking, school, and chore schedule. It's only 20 miles after all.

Changing Our Diet

When in Rome, eat pasta. When in Polynesia, eat bokchoy. Bokchoy is a fantastic vegetable with which I had almost no familiarity prior to our puddle jump. Shame on me. It is a cruiser's delight: cheap, crunchy, widely available, and it keeps a surprisingly long time in the fridge. The greens are good raw as a substitute for lettuce in salads and sandwiches. They are equally good sautéed as greens in a stir fry or as leafy green in soups and stews. The stems are tasty in any situation -- raw or cooked -- where normally you might otherwise use celery. But unlike celery and romaine, I find I can keep bokchoy in the fridge for up to two weeks with almost no noticeable change. We've never kept it longer as we use it up fairly rapidly. Bokchoy is now a staple of the Don Quixote diet and will remain so even after we arrive in more varied veggie ports.

Another addition to our diet is the pamplemousse. I've always wondered what these things were. They look like enormous green grapefruit, not particularly appealing and ridiculously large. I can't remember seeing them in the States, but they did appear in New Zealand stores with some degree of frequency. If the price is right, we'll continue munching on these globes long after we leave the South Pacific. One pamplemousse is enough to feed the entire family at lunch along with the ubiquitous baguette, a chunk of cheap brie-like cheese, and some stalks of bokchoy or carrots.

The common veggies with which we have had little contact and less interest include taro and breadfruit. After reading Herman Melville's description of his first encounter with breadfruit in Typee, I don't feel particularly guilty over this omission. There is also a red prickly fruit which looks a bit like a sea anemone and tastes gooey and sour with little mitigating flavor to make it worth eating. Locals love these, and they can be found at every corner stand, but I can't see the appeal. Lamentably, another extremely popular vegetable in Polynesia is Chinese eggplant. It too is widely available, cheap, and keeps well. Sadly, I loathe eggplant. The only way I can enjoy eggplant is breaded, fried, and buried deep in a casserole consisting of small bits of eggplant hidden between thick layers of cheese, spicy tomato sauce, spicy sausage, and pasta.

The kids are big fans of coconut. As a parent, I advocate cultivating coconut interest in your children while you travel. Coconuts are quite literally lying on the ground everywhere. Throw the children overboard armed with little more than a screw driver, and they will spend hours feeding themselves. Coconuts are very satisfying to harvest, shuck, crack and eat. Done properly, the process involves throwing things, making stuff fall out of trees, ripping, shredding and tearing something to bits, banging, whacking, smashing, chipping, scrapping, and shattering. The yield is incredibly pure, slightly sweet juice in a rewardingly large volume along with firm, crunchy coconut meat. If you have a scraper and a small piece of fabric, you can also make coconut cream which tastes like melted coconut ice cream. Don't let the kids bring coconuts back to the boat. The shucking process generates copious amounts of husk shreds that burst open in a startling display of dirty bark bits which then adhere to every surface for a distance of 5 meters -- in over words, at least half your boat. The bits then bond to the bottoms of cat and people feet and are tracked to every other horizontal surface on the boat. It takes weeks to de-coconut-huskify your boat. If your children insist on bringing coconuts back, have them husk the fruit before returning to the boat then stick the resulting nuts in a zip lock bag in the fridge. They won't be quite as fresh as unhusked nuts, but they are still tasty even a week or two later.

French Polynesia is the land of the cheap baguette. At first, we reveled in the crunchy white bread. After a few weeks, however, we're heartily sick of it. It's like eating French Wonder Bread. It fills you up but leaves you with the dissatisfying sensation that you've essentially been eating the wheat equivalent of cotton candy. Baguettes are available at every magazin in the entire country as long as you get there before 0700. We always make pre-orders at the magazin so we can go in the next day at whatever hour suits our fancy. If you keep your baguettes in a sunny, dry spot out of the way of moist, night breezes, they dry out perfectly. You can then make them into bread puddings, stuffing, or croutons with little effort. We also enjoy smearing them with a seasoned tomato paste, a bit of pepperoni and some cheese and baking them into pizza bites. I've taken pizza bites to potlucks many times. I have never ever made enough no matter how many I bake.

Buying meat in Polynesia is a bit bass backwards. Beef is extremely expensive, New Zealand lamb about the same as in New Zealand, and chicken from the United States pricey but within reach. The cheapest protein is sushi grade tuna which can be had at any major magazin or market for roughly 750 CP/kg ($4.15/pound). I know this sounds terrible, but we've taken to buying enormous chunks of tuna, slicing it into steaks, and freezing it for later use. While sometimes we make sushi, more often we grill the steaks and serve with chili sweet and spicy or wasabi/soy flavored sauces. Leftovers get made into sandwich spreads or even -- sacre bleu! -- tuna noodle casserole. You can also purchase meats in cans… any meats. I've never seen beef in a can before. I confess, we haven't bought it yet. Bad us. We should at least try it. However, I have no idea what to do with canned beef.

The girls report that French Polynesian candy and pastries don't really stand out. Aeron says that the banana fried in dough might be a tasty exception. Most everything, however, is a bit glutinous or just plain odd. The hard candy which tastes like honey dipped in a pine tree is particularly strange and more than a bit medicinal. Everything pales in comparison to the aforementioned coconut cream derived from the girls' hard effort and a shaver. Instead of sweets, the girls report that they most enjoy the abundant sushi with its sweet Polynesian soy sauce and the poisson cru which is white fish ceviched in lime juice and salty coconut milk. According to Mera, it's very odd and it goes down your throat in a "queasy way," but it tastes really good.

We eat a lot of Mexican package cookies, crackers, cereals, and canned goods. Sometimes I think we'll be munching meloras on Saltinas for the rest of our lives. We are going to arrive in New Zealand with roughly 100 casera salsa cans for the simple reason that we ran out of tortas, and there isn't a decent tortilla chip to be found anywhere in the South Pacific. This lack is probably okay since beer the local Hinano beer is $3/can and tastes terrible. We plan to just wait it out drinking rum cocktails and munching raw coconut and sashimi till we get to New Zealand. Rough culinary life.

Nous Sommes Reparer

Don Quixote is once again a fully operational vessel.

Jaime does not need surgery. Basically, the new wisdom tooth is starting to form behind and under the last molar, but it's not ready to come up. The pain of the growth resulted in Jaime not cleaning properly which led to a small infection and then a bad loop of behavior and bacteria. The dentist cleaned it all up, shot it full of antibiotics, and handed us some drugs and a mouth wash. However, the dentist did say that starting her orthodonture in November is "obligitaire". This is the polite French way of saying, "Do it or else disaster will strike."

The outboard can be fixed with parts from Tahiti that might get here in a week or two. So we bought a new one. It's exactly like the old one except it's shiny and it works. I've tried for nearly five years to believe that the two conditions -- shiny and functional -- are not obligitaire. Yet ultimately, there was something incredibly liberating in the act of dumping the old motor in the bottom of the dinghy and strapping on the new one. It started. It ran. It thrummed powerfully. It got us out to the boat. This morning's spontaneous decision to drop several thousand dollars on a new motor was motivated in part by a rather apocryphal experience attempting to row upwind in 20 knots to get Jaime to her dentist. Someday I'll have enough emotional distance to write about it. Today, it just didn't seem funny.

Now before I see the comments in the blog, yes I am fully cognizant of the irony that we have spent enormous amounts of time, angst and energy thwarting dinghy outboard thieves. We could have saved ourselves a tremendous amount of misery had we simply allowed our old one to be stolen and submitted an insurance claim. In fact, arguably we would have done the cruising world a community service by diverting the thieves of Polynesia towards an investment of time and energy in stealing the horrible thing and then more time and money to get it to work. Maybe it would have put them off their feed. In any case, DrC is stripping our old motor of everything useful and old looking. The harness, cover, gas tank, and fins are all going to be put on the new motor. The shiny new cover and brand new tank will be hidden in the port bow. This effort both makes the new motor less appealing to the casual thief as well as improves the resale value down the road when we slap the shiny new back on.

On balance, the day cost less than we anticipated. The motor put us back a large sum, but the sum was only about 10% greater than the price in the United States and maybe 15% greater than New Zealand. It hurts but we're not resentful. The dentist cost less than $40USD which is amazing considering the time and materials, the fun with translation, and the X-rays he took. We spent another $15USD on pharmaceuticals, again a very reasonable price for the purchase. We extravagantly threw some money at a snack-bar-tiarea and had french fries, sausage dim sum, and fruit smoothies. It all could have been so much worse. There was a distinct possibility of returning to Tahiti, oral surgery, and dogz know what else. It's all good.

Tonight, we'll have dinner with Ceilydh. They are also here in the Raiatea Carenege area getting work done on their sails. Tomorrow, I think we'll try to put the entire F.U.D. of the past weeks behind us. There is a turtle sanctuary near by as well as a river to explore, excellent provisioning at the local market, and a reportedly excellent snorkel and dive spot. We need a vacation.

Another Quick Status

No stories today, funny or serious. Just an update on Jaime and the outboard. Both are still broken. The cruising community -- in particular the South Pacific Cruisers Net (0230 UTC 6224.0) -- is proving particularly helpful in getting us organized. Today, we will sail over to Raiatea. The second largest city in Polynesia is located there at Uturoa. We'll hopefully get Jaime into a dentist tomorrow (Wed) and the motor into a mechanic this afternoon. If Jaime needs to return to Tahiti for surgery, a northeastern light breeze is helpfully coming in this weekend to blow us down there in reasonable comfort.

As always is the case when the issue of medical care in a foreign country arises, opinions on medicine in French Polynesia is deeply divided. We hear reports that the French locals always return to France when they want medical care and avoid the local services. On the other side are Polynesians and forever cost-conscious cruisers who report positively on the quality of medical care here. We already had reason to visit a Polynesian doctor and health clinic. The experience left DrC and I feeling satisfied and moderately impressed. The care was not as cheap as Mexico and considerably less expensive than the United States. The staff were highly competent and friendly, the facilities and equipment modern and clean. The pharmacies are well stocked and carry medicines in both familiar brand names as well as generic alternatives. The doctor was French and trained in France. Moreover, he was nice about my broken French. Trust me, they don't teach you in high school French any of the words I needed for that visit. The bottom line is that I see no reason for us to fly to the States or New Zealand should it become necessary to have any of Jaime's teeth pulled. The only reason we might have to go to Tahiti is if the extraction is going to be sufficiently complicated that it requires someone who isn't in Raiatea. Given the small population, there may only be one oral surgeon in the entire country.

As for the outboard, I'd love to buy a new one. Folks in the comments recently suggested I put a donation button on the blog. Instead of "Donate Now", I think our button should say, "Fix the outboard already, we're heartily sick of hearing you bitch about it!" When I told DrC, oblivious and annoyingly thick man that he is, he suggested that if people had money to donate, they should give it to a charity. I hit him. No kidding. I just grabbed the nearest pillow and smashed it into his chest. While I'm no James Herriot, I'd like to think that my stories are stories. There was a time when story writers actually got paid for their stories. *gasp!* It is not so much that I feel I need to solicit donations, as there is an old school part of me that really likes the idea of getting Paid To Write. So I want to thank those of you who suggested the idea. If nothing else, it is tremendously flattering to know that there are readers who enjoy this blog enough that they would consider paying for it. It also encourages the slightly delusional notion that someday, I'll skim off the cream of these stories and compile them into a book. As for my husband, I'm thinking of putting a poll button on the blog instead with the question: "Is DrC -trying- to get murdered in his sleep? (Yes/No)"

Securing the Dinghy - The Sequel

Moorea is a great island for hikers. There are roads and trails all over the island with variegated forests, incredibly scenic vistas, and great sites both natural and historic to reward the intrepid walker. Today's walk will take us through the valley lowlands past experimental farms, a natural resource college and grazing lands. Then we'll head up through -- of all things -- a pine and fern forest before breaking through towards the top to a platform with a stunning view of both Cook and Oponunu Bays. The road also takes us past a part of the Ag School which sells samples of local products as well as ice cream. The station is a must-do in Moorea. My personal recommendation is the passion fruit ice cream and the tiare flavored honey. It is also the only place in French Polynesia where I have found whole coffee beans. On the return journey, we'll opt for the walking trail through the forest and pineapple farms, past archeological sites dating back nearly 600 years. 

But first we must secure the dink. The first attempt to secure the dink at Pointe Venus was such a great success, we decide to change up our technique a bit in Moorea. We estimate that today's hike is roughly 8 km round trip (not including getting lost on side trails), so we'll be gone several hours, leaving the boat unattended and exposed to all sorts of mischief. It won't do to leave the dinghy and motor within easy reach on shore. The basic soundness of the idea "drop the family on shore, secure the dinghy to Don Quixote, then swim ashore" is not in question. The problem was obviously in the execution: in particular with my inability to handle the motor or the now somewhat infamous anchor chain. So, we'll just eliminate both obstacles. 

First, we lock the dinghy motor to its stand on Don Quixote, and we grab DrC's home-made paddles for a quick row ashore. This part actually goes quite well. We don't even lose anything overboard. After breaking one of our original oars in Nuka Hiva, DrC made a replacement set out of broom handles, splits of plywood, long screws, and wood glue. Unstoppable! that's my captain. The oars are about 5 feet long and weigh a ton, but they make very good paddles. In fact, I can honestly report that Jaime and I think these are a substantial improvement over our old, light-weight, aluminum and plastic pair. We canoe paddle over the glassy water to shore with commendable skill and rapidity. We make landfall without a hitch, disembarking today's princess (Aeron in her tennis shoes) without so much as a splash. All I have to do now is row back to Don Quixote, lock up the dinghy, and swim ashore.

DrC and Jaime push me off and the dinghy sails into the still waters of the bay with me balanced precariously in the middle looking vainly for a seat. When you canoe paddle, you sit on either side of the boat and try to paddle with a single oar without screaming to your partner that he or she is a complete moron for failing to paddle at precisely the same rate and strength as yourself. Rowing, however, requires that you sit with your back to bow in the middle of the boat with both oars threaded through oar locks (assuming you haven't lost these overboard on an atoll in the middle of nowhere) while you stroke your oars in harmonious and balanced synchronicity. Done right, it is beautiful to watch and great exercise. But as I drift farther and farther off shore, I realize with a doomed sense of inevitability that one of the single most important props necessary to enact my rowing drama is missing. I have no place to sit. 

If DrC can be unstoppable, who am I to quibble at details. I thread my homemade oars through the oarlocks and carefully balance myself in the middle of the dinghy. With legs spread wide, feet braced in the crack between hard bottom and inflatable pontoon, I begin to row. It turns out that the five feet of broom handle is about 2 feet too short to make my first posture feasible, so with a wiggle of my back side, I squat and tentatively take another stroke. It works! Never mind that I can't see where I'm going or that the bow is still pointing at the shoreline, I'm making progress in roughly the right direction. I ignore the somewhat urgent yells of my family who are somewhat unhelpfully pointing out that the dinghy is moving backwards. I put my heart and back into the effort, and the dinghy accelerates, suffusing me with pride and overcoming the niggling worry that in my crouched position I look like I'm taking a crap in the aft end of the dink while simultaneously flapping wooden wings to hurry the process.

From the shore, the frantic calls of my family reach a new pitch. I look up from my crouch to see them urgently pointing to the left. A glance in that direction reveals two jet skis heading straight for me. I am apparently the somewhat mobile target platform for a teenage jet ski race-a-thon, or I might merely be the only interesting way point in an otherwise empty bay. In any case, the two craft zoom up and around my dinghy enveloping me in sound, spray and a rocking wake. Precarious balance shot to hell, my feet fly out from under me and the oars launch themselves into space as my butt hits the very hard bottom. Flat on my back staring at enormous, puffy white clouds, feeling the gradual diminution of the jet ski wake and waiting until I can once again breathe, I ponder the meaning of my cruising existence. As I can not recall ever reading about any other idiot knocking themselves out on the bottom of their dinghy after attempting to row it with homemade wooden oars and no seat, it becomes absolutely clear to me that we're doing it wrong. 

Painfully, I haul myself to a seated position. As my head pops into view, a cheer arises from the shore. My loving family is happy to see I have survived. Although as I clamber up and retrieve the oars a bitter inner voice tells me that they might just be happy to note I am once again underway, back in the poop position which I later learn makes for fabulously amusing photos. Unstoppable we might be, but it would be nice to get through even one day with a bit more grace.

Moving Backwards

We have two problems which are likely to push us back to Tahiti. First, our outboard is dead. Again. [Insert a series of swear words here] The last problem of fuel solved, now the lower unit seems to be footer. [More swear words] DrC is giving up. We keep throwing $70 here and $140 there at this thing without any permanent fix. We can not cruise without an outboard. Right now is a perfect example. We're pinned down at the anchor off Fare on Huahine because of wind squalls blowing through and an uncertain motor. It might get us ashore and back, it might not and it is much too windy to row. All these attempts to save the dinghy outboard from being stolen seem to be incredibly misplaced.

This problem is NOT resolving itself. DrC is ready to throw the damn thing overboard. We can buy a new one in Tahiti for roughly three grand. Lovely. But we have to go back to Tahiti to do this. We might be able to cut the price considerably by purchasing it duty free. That's an interesting wrinkle. It'll still be insanely expensive.

But the real reason we'll probably end up back in Tahiti is Jaime's teeth. Her wisdom teeth can't wait another 4 months and have decided to erupt. Now. I don't know what the heck we're going to do about this, actually. We're emailing the orthodontist who took her x-rays last year. Hard to say what we're going to learn from that exercise. At this point, DrC is proposing that I fly her to New Zealand and get her orthodont started. Because we can afford that. Two tickets to New Zealand from Tahiti, please.

I'm depressed today. No decisions can be made for at least 24 hours in any case. Then we'll have to figure out what to do next. Part of me is in denial. The other part of me is making cheese buns. I finally found a yeast that works in 80F temperatures. My New Zealand just couldn't handle the temperatures and my Mexican yeast couldn't handle French flour. My Polynesian yeast is happy here, but I expect it to start balking as soon as we head west to the Cook Islands. In the meantime, we had garlic rolls for dinner, fried dough for breakfast, cheese buns for lunch. The entire family will soon be in a yeast coma.

At least it's cheap.

Pahn Pahn Pahn

Editor's Note: Corrected to spell securite correctly. Thank you Steve.

A long string of nonsensical franco-sounding syllables bursts from the VHF startling the entire family out of our familiar and comfortable bickering at the dinner table. The only sounds that are clear to all members of the family are the mariner's knell of "pan pan pan."

Everyone knows about "mayday". You say mayday when things have gone completely to hell and you need help… like ten minutes ago. In all our years out cruising, we've only heard one mayday. We were somewhere up in the Pacific Northwest near the San Juan Islands. The mayday was issued by a woman on a powerboat. The captain had been injured -- it was never clear how but he was incapacitated and unable to come to the radio -- and the woman was helpless. She could barely operate the radio, let alone operate the boat itself. We listened with an odd mixture of horrified fascination and worry as the US Coast Guard attempted to first get the woman to change from 16 to another channel, and -- failing that -- tried to assist the woman to secure the vessel. The craft was drifting ashore and perilously close to running up on rocks before we gratefully heard the Coast Guard announce on 16 that they were within sight of the vessel. Not long after, 16 went silent again as the Coast Guard took over the boat and apparently got the women off channel. Ever since, we have enforced a family policy that everyone on the boat knows how to operate the radios as well as drive the boat solo in the event of an emergency. It is hard to overemphasize how frustrating it was to bear witness to this woman's helplessness.

"Securite securite securite" is another VHF radio alert. In the United States and Canada, you'll hear the securite message frequently. Generally, it is used by officials such as the Coast Guard to make non-emergency announcements such as navigational hazards as well as by weather services to alert boaters to the pending delivery of an updated weather report. Interestingly, we never heard the securite message in Mexico. This is no doubt due to the fact that outside of a few very select areas, Mexicans do not broadcast marine weather reports via VHF. In French Polynesia, our memory of the securite messages was refreshed upon arrival in Tahiti. For the Tahiti and Bora Bora areas, Meteorologie France regularly broadcasts weather reports on 26 and 27. Of course, the alert is "seh-kyu-reh-teh" and in French, but it's nice to be back in a country which keeps its mariners apprised of the weather.

Somewhere between "mayday" and "securite" is the "pan pan pan." A pan message indicates that someone or something is in trouble, but the trouble is not necessarily immediately life threatening. There is such a broad range between mayday and securite, that any time you hear a pan, the ears perk and the heart starts to beat a bit faster. To some mariners, anything short of a ship actually banging on rocks and sinking is merely a pan, whereas other folks think a pan is when you run out of fuel and are drifting slowly down the Straits of Juan de Fuca with an estimated landfall three or four days hence. One of the laws of the sea -- sometimes literally a legal requirement and at others merely a custom -- is that all vessels hearing a request for assistance such as a pan alert are required to render assistance if at all possible. A pan alert on channel 16, in other words, could literally mean the end of dinner and a very rough few hours while you do what you can to save the property and life of a complete stranger.

The vessel that has garnered the most positive karma in pan situations on the puddle jump this year must be Loose Pointer. While preparing our boats, we all simply stopped counting the number of times that Dan and company piled into the dinghy and went out to save another vessel. Usually, it was a boat dragging in a norther or poorly anchored boats that started banging into each other in the typical Magote waltz. At least once, he zoomed out all the way to Costa Baja to tow in a completely disabled vessel. Dan has supplied endless tools to repair Don Quixote and other boats, loaned us a critically needed outboard motor, and been the best companion boat a cruiser could ask for. They also towed Star Gap 12 miles into Papeete when it looked like that benighted vessel was going to extend its 7 week Galapagos journey another few weeks and go all the way to Tonga. I am sure there are other rescues. Dan and Kathryn are considering renaming their vessel "Triple A".

Tonight's pan alert, however, is completely incomprehensible. I am considerably more sympathetic now over DrC's protests that he could never understand the Mexicans chattering on VHF. Heavily Tahitian accented French over VHF is about as close to complete babble as it gets. What I am able to translate is something having to do with a very large thunderstorm, lightening, no power, and near Papeete. Even the words I am able to grasp in the stream of nonsense is enough to worry all of us. Deep in Oponunu Bay, we're getting hammered ourselves by incredibly heavy rain and intermittent gusts in the 25 to 30 range. It's not hard to imagine a boat getting hit by lightening just outside of Papeete harbor and now drifting towards the barrier reef. We are not, however, in any position to help even if this is the case. We're a minimum of three hours away and on the hook. Someone else needs to respond to this pan.

We watch each other chew in dead silence while we await a response. The pan message is issued a second and then a third time with no reply. Each time, I'm able to decipher just a few more words, confirming my initial impression and adding the knowledge that the vessel is out of the Tuamotus, power, and large. It might even be one of the cargo ships or ferries. Finally, someone responds in a version of French even more incomprehensible than the vessel in distress. Now, I am completely unable to figure out what is going on. However, the knowledge that someone is interacting with the disabled vessel dramatically reduces the tension on Don Quixote. Bickering over the division of the pumpkin pie resumes punctuated periodically with squawks from the radio which sound like negotiations on how and where to tow the disabled craft. Eventually, DrC has had enough, and we turn of the radio for the remainder of the emergency.

Someday, we may "pull a Loose Pointer;" We may be the rescuer, motoring out of our way to help a fellow mariner. Sadly, it is also true that we could be the rescuee, needing the assistance that only another boat can render. The constant chatter on the hailing and emergency channels is a part of our lives, a constant reminder to us that bad juju can happen at any time on the sea. At the same time, it reassures us that there are also helpful strangers out there who are listening for our mayday, pan or security, ready to lend a hand.

What is Missing?

It's a relatively common question -- "What do you miss while cruising?"

In some ways, it's very hard to answer. Arguably, I miss nothing. I have my family, my husband, my health, the biggest and most magnificent backyard in the world, and I don't have to go to work. Ever. Compared to these advantages, it feels rather petty to go on and on about the small things I crave, the medium things I jones for, the big items for which I sometimes think I would literally kill. Out here, missing stuff is very much a part of our way of life. It's the empty wistful next to the full glass of amazing.

Let's first confront head on the mistaken notion that French Polynesia is a third world country. Some of the comments I've seen on this blog and elsewhere suggest that folks might have a concept of the South Pacific islands as impossibly remote and primitive, where people are living an incredibly hard scrabble existence with no modern amenities. There may be islands so remote that this description still holds true. However, on most islands and in all the cases we've had an opportunity to visit, French Polynesians lead a relatively modern lifestyle that would not be terribly unfamiliar to the average American, Kiwi, or Australian. While adopting a very beach casual with flippy floppies attire, they are by no means the palm frond and flower clad naked folk that we see in the dance shows. The islands have established road systems, distributed electrical and communication grids, satellite access to international communication and Internet, and regular supply ships carrying the exact same cheap Chinese plastic crap and friable cotton clothing found literally everywhere.

The one aspect that seems uniquely different from North America is that many Polynesian homesteads include a very robust cottage farm component with established fruit trees, bushes, and vegetable gardens. This is due no doubt largely because ferry supplies are considerably less fresh than local and usually expensive. With the exception of the capital Papeete, French Polynesian towns are incredibly clean. On the smaller islands and all the atolls, there is a high rate of solar power adoption and many of the atolls are investing heavily in water cachement systems. The economy here appears robust and is based on tourism, pearl farming, as well as copra, flower and fruit exports. It will be interesting to witness their transformation over time as they gradually wean their economy from the heavy subsidization of France. At this point, I would bet on the Polynesians as they appear a highly adaptable people. As is frequently the case, we see a deep contrast between the people who live in the well developed areas and those who live below the poverty line. This reminds me strongly of coastal Mexico where educated Mexicans taking part in the modern economy shop at Costco, Home Depot and WalMart, drive their suburbans, and send their children to private school, where the uneducated and extremely poor underclass live in plywood shacks with dirt floors and live largely on fishing while growing their own chickens, beans, and limons.

As a result of the high degree of modernization, there are few commercial goods which are truly unavailable here. If we want it, we could buy it. While availability can be a problem for the average cruiser on the atolls and smaller islands, locals order what they want and it appears on the next supply ship. The problem is cost. Everything here except coconuts, pamplemousse and bokchoy is imported at insane cost. I don't honestly know how the locals afford it. I frankly can not even figure out how they feed their children. But obviously, the economy works for residents as most appear prosperous: well fed, well clothed with cars, cell phones, good medical care, and satellite television. (As a side note, we've had reason to sample the local medical services and -- yet again -- it puts the American medical establishment to shame… quick, reasonable prices, highly professional, no wait.)

So what could we on Don Quixote possibly want? American candy and English language books. Actually, when you travel it is super important to stash a lot of the little sauces, candies, and other treats you favor, because even if they have the same product in another country, it doesn't taste the same. We are now on our fourth Dorito's Nacho Cheese chips, none of which taste like home even though the packaging is identical. I have no idea what the hell they've done to the recipe, but the version in Polynesia is even worse than Mexico and that's saying something. I can't find red vines and the M&Ms don't crunch right. Asian sauces are abundant here so don't worry about packing soy sauce or wasabi or Thai fish sauce, but you can kiss good bye anything even remotely Central or South American. It's as if every taste south of Oklahoma is simply non-existent in the South Pacific -- including NZ and Australia.

Reading material is a bigger problem. At least in Mexico, the cruisers made a point of establishing English language book exchanges. For whatever reason, we have not found any similar, large scale give-one-get-one exchange anywhere in Polynesia. As a result, everyone in the family has pretty much read everything on the boat, and there is just no replacing it. We can't even count on getting new books when we get to New Zealand as for some reason, the cost of a book in New Zealand is only marginally less than the book's weight in gold on the open market. Our electronic devices have not helped as pretty much all of them are either gradually or abruptly failing. The iPad and Aeron's iTouch are down for the count, Jaime's iTouch has a smashed screen, and the entire back of my MacBook is melting in a manner that disturbingly suggests imminent and explosive failure of the lithium battery. So much for ebooks. To delay the inevitable end, I've purchased two children's books and a few adult books in French for Aeron and myself. It's a start.

I think if I had to have a care package mailed to us at incredible expense, it would include the following: iPod headphones, Branch's butter mints, three packages of Costco women's briefs (all dark colours), a replacement sun protection hat from REI (mine finally died), sets of flippers for the kids (and here they cost $40USD/pair), and a replacement iPad or Kindle stuffed to the memory limit with science fiction, non-fiction, and South Pacific tour guides. And Taco Bell. Oh my god, I would kill for lunch at Taco Bell.

Securing the Dink

Disturbing news was recently published on the Puddle Jump lists to the effect that dinghies and outboards are being stolen in unprecedented numbers from Tahitian and Moorean anchorages. These are not rumors. We've spoken with one of the captains who lost a dinghy. Tourism officials and local organizers made a point of letting all the participants at the rendezvous know that this is a serious, unresolved issue, and cruisers should be highly alert.

As a result, when we decided to go for yet another of our many "hikes in the woods" today leaving from Pointe Venus on the northwest corner of Tahiti, DrC and I canoodled for quite some time on what to do about the dinghy. Obviously, we needed it to get to shore, but neither of us felt comfortable leaving the vessel unattended on the beach. We decided to drive the dinghy to shore, drop the family, then I would drive back and chain the dinghy to our transom. Along with the locks on the motor, we felt this would prove a strong deterrent to the casual thief.

Like many of our great ideas, this one proved challenging to implement. First, the locks are slippery. I mean this literally. After telling us not to drop them overboard about 500 times in the past three weeks, DrC promptly drops one of them overboard as we leave Don Quixote fully loaded with children and hiking gear. I watch it sink out of sight with only the smallest sigh and a warning look when the captain starts to shift the blame. He subsides after sufficient glaring and motors us into shore. Our next hurdle comes from a common problem -- I can't start the dinghy motor. Actually, I can. I sweat, I swear, I disavow all knowledge of mechanical things, I kick the soft squishy sides of the dinghy (not the hard crunchy toe-breaking bottom), I chant something, then I agree that my soul belongs to the devil, after which it starts. By this time, locals are gathering on the beach and watching the entire performance with something approaching glee. I don't think French T.V. is nearly as entertaining as American cruisers with recalcitrant outboards. My inner child decides that I am merely enacting a scene to ensure that these self same locals have absolutely no motivation to steal a dinghy which can cause such loud and embarrassing antics.

The drive back to Don Quixote is otherwise uneventful. Which is good, because now I have to figure out how to chain up the dinghy. DrC had thoughtfully moved the heavy stern chain bucket to the starboard transom. The idea was to use the security cable on the bow of the dinghy, loop it through the transom handle, then loop chain through both the dinghy and the handle, and then lock chain, cable and dinghy together. However, the security cable is pretty short, the chain unwieldy, and in the 10 knot breeze, the dinghy keeps moving off out of range of the two. Frustrated, I throw one leg into the dinghy and brace the other on edge of the transom step while I wrestle with the cable and the chain. Giving the chain a yank to get more scope, I find myself suddenly in possession of plenty of chain while the rest slides off the transom, down the steps and with a clatter worthy of the ghost of Christmas past slides into the ocean.

It's 25' of high test 3/8 chain leftover from when we replaced the front rode. It weighs about a million pounds. It goes into the water simultaneously slow enough for me to mentally record every single link and quickly enough that it takes considerably longer to describe the event than to actually live it. What I want to do is drop the chain, divorce my husband, move to a one bedroom flat in Seattle, and pretend like this never happened… "this" essentially being my entire life. What I do instead is pretend like I have inner thigh muscles and squeeze the two boats together, hanging on to the chain for dear life. With the dinghy touching the transom, I throw as much of the remaining chain as I can over the bow of the dinghy. A satisfying few feet land with a thunk in the hard bottom. Then in a maneuver worthy of Cirque du Soleil and never to be repeated, I swing my DQ side leg over the bow and sit my ass on the chain. To do this, I must briefly let go of the chain, but I use my impossibly hard and/or impossibly large and squishy ass to pin the thing to the bow of the dinghy. A most disconcerting sensation of chain links moving rapidly between my butt cheeks alerts me immediately to the essential stupidity of this strategy, so I reach between my legs and grab -- quite literally, the last foot of chain before the entire lot drops into the ocean.

Cruising life presents many such "Now what?" moments in which no possible action can reasonably taken, but life or expensive property depends on taking the action successfully. I have hold of the chain which due to its length and weight has now effectively anchored me a few feet from the stern of Don Quixote. There is no bringing it back on board either vessel. My back is not something we talk about much, but suffice it to say that it still doesn't work. I'm not going to be able to get this thing inboard. But I can lock it! I have locks. I have a at least one fully functional lock somewhere in the bottom of the dinghy. With one hand on the chain, I use the other to grab the cable at the bow of the dinghy, then loop it into the handhold on DQ's transom. With a third hand I was unaware I possessed, I grab the lock and braid the mess together in a secure tangle. My last considered action is to drop the cable, watching lock, chain end, and cable all sink three feet before settling as neat as you please into a taught stern hook. The dinghy is now so tightly and inextricably bound to the back of Don Quixote that the two craft might as well be grafted together.

With considerable élan, I don my goggles, dive neatly off the dinghy, and swim ashore. DrC regards me curiously as I stride through the shallows, "How did it go?"

"Swimmingly!" I reply with a heartiness that has all four of my family members staring at me suspiciously. "There's gonna be a wee bit of work when we get back, but it's all good. No one is going to be stealing the dinghy while we're gone. Trust me."

Kid Boat Party

It seemed like a good idea at the time… host a kid boat post rendezvous party. "At the time," however, took place while we were hundreds of miles from any kids except those on our buddy boat. Lots and lots of children in the same place seemed like a fantastic idea. Of course, lots and lots of children in the same place is perhaps a much better idea on paper than it is in person. 

Don Quixote broadcast the call on the SSB South Pacific Cruisers Net for kid boats to meet in Moorea the day after the Tahiti-Moorea Rendezvous. The idea was to extend the opportunity for kids to just hang out together. We volunteered to host the day, bringing a few activities and some grilled meats to seed the party, as it were. When asked, "What do you have planned?" I confessed that the sum total of my plan was to, "Put the kids ashore and get out of the way." Response to the idea was enthusiastic and ultimately, a dozen boats joined us with nearly twenty kids ranging from 5 to 17 years old. The kids skewed mostly older this year, surprising to long time observers of the Puddle Jump fleet. All the kids but Jake of Savannah were 10 and over. In fact, at times this year we fleet adults feel we are awash in teen angst, nautical style.

As a rule, boat kids need little guidance on how to have fun. Even when they are in very small numbers or solo, boat kids know how to take advantage of everything around them to fill their days. Boat kids bring inexhaustible curiosity and energy to everything they do. The prior day during the official rendezvous, it was our many boat kids who consumed the majority of the time and energy of the locals who were on hand to teach crafts such as lei and basket making, coconut husking, and coconut milking. They were active participants in the canoe and fruit carrying races, and it was the kids who tried to pick up the monster rocks of the Tahitian weight lifters. 

The kid boat day on the beach was essentially a repeat of the prior day's activities without the pretty flowers, clever adults, and musical entertainment. DrC and I went ashore and nominally kept count of the many sun-bleached heads while the kids made their own party. While at times we lost sight of a few of the flock, the activities we saw them engage in included: hair braiding, tying people to trees, climbing trees, stripping trees of bark, hanging people from trees, running around trees, lifting trees up, pulling trees down, making plates, bowls, hats, whips, and tables out of tree leaves, getting coconuts out of trees, throwing coconuts into trees, knighting people with tree chunks, sitting in trees, eating trees, and sitting under trees eating. There were also many activities which involved rope, some of which looked positively dangerous and all of which included at least one bowline and two half-hitches, one project even included a monkey's fist. 

As the sun set, the adults starting drifting ashore with drinks and food. In a memorable display of stupidity, Toast dropped all the sausages overboard after being sent to retrieve dinner. "One hand for the boat, one hand for the sausage" is not just a salacious commentary on cruising couples any more; These are literally words to live by. Fortunately, Watcha Gonna Do and Loose Pointer stepped into the gap with enormous pots of Mac N'Cheese (the meal of champions) and dorado (the meal of cruisers who can actually catch fish) respectively. Everyone got plenty to eat, spent an enjoyable evening swapping stories, and got a bit tipsy happy besides. Of course, we kid boats can afford to enjoy sundowners on the beach as the kids were there zooming around in the dinghies to rescue us after dark. Good to ship out with your own designated driver!

So a note to kid boats following in our wake in subsequent years. Organizing a kid boat party requires a radio, roughly five minutes of concentrated thought, and a really good sun hat for the day of the event. Otherwise, both children and adults of the kid boat fleet take care of themselves and know how to enjoy a a nice long day together on a tropical beach in paradise. Just don't drop the sausage!

Kid Boat Party

It seemed like a good idea at the time… host a kid boat post rendezvous party. "At the time," however, took place while we were hundreds of miles from any kids except those on our buddy boat. Lots and lots of children in the same place seemed like a fantastic idea. Of course, lots and lots of children in the same place is perhaps a much better idea on paper than it is in person. 

Don Quixote broadcast the call on the SSB South Pacific Cruisers Net for kid boats to meet in Moorea the day after the Tahiti-Moorea Rendezvous. The idea was to extend the opportunity for kids to just hang out together. We volunteered to host the day, bringing a few activities and some grilled meats to seed the party, as it were. When asked, "What do you have planned?" I confessed that the sum total of my plan was to, "Put the kids ashore and get out of the way." Response to the idea was enthusiastic and ultimately, a dozen boats joined us with over twenty kids ranging from 5 to 17 years old. The kids skewed mostly older this year, surprising to long time observers of the Puddle Jump fleet. All the kids but Jake of Savannah were 10 and over. In fact, at times this year we fleet adults feel we are awash in teen angst, nautical style.

As a rule, boat kids need little guidance on how to have fun. Even when they are in very small numbers or solo, boat kids know how to take advantage of everything around them to fill their days. Boat kids bring inexhaustible curiosity and energy to everything they do. The prior day during the official rendezvous, it was our many boat kids who consumed the majority of the time and energy of the locals who were on hand to teach crafts such as lei and basket making, coconut husking, and coconut milking. They were active participants in the canoe and fruit carrying races, and it was the kids who tried to pick up the monster rocks of the Tahitian weight lifters. 

The kid boat day on the beach was essentially a repeat of the prior day's activities without the pretty flowers, clever adults, and musical entertainment. DrC and I went ashore and nominally kept count of the many sun-bleached heads while the kids made their own party. While at times we lost sight of a few of the flock, the activities we saw them engage in included: hair braiding, tying people to trees, climbing trees, stripping trees of bark, hanging people from trees, running around trees, lifting trees up, pulling trees down, making plates, bowls, hats, whips, and tables out of tree leaves, getting coconuts out of trees, throwing coconuts into trees, knighting people with tree chunks, sitting in trees, eating trees, and sitting under trees eating. There were also many activities which involved rope, some of which looked positively dangerous and all of which included at least one bowline and two half-hitches, one project even included a monkey's fist. 

As the sun set, the adults starting drifting ashore with drinks and food. In a memorable display of stupidity, Toast dropped all the sausages overboard after being sent to retrieve dinner. "One hand for the boat, one hand for the sausage" is not just a salacious commentary on cruising couples any more; These are literally words to live by. Fortunately, Watcha Gonna Do and Loose Pointer stepped into the gap with enormous pots of Mac N'Cheese (the meal of champions) and dorado (the meal of cruisers who can actually catch fish) respectively. Everyone got plenty to eat, spent an enjoyable evening swapping stories, and got a bit tipsy happy besides. Of course, we kid boats can afford to enjoy sundowners on the beach as the kids were there zooming around in the dinghies to rescue us after dark. Good to ship out with your own designated driver!

So a note to kid boats following in our wake in subsequent years. Organizing a kid boat party requires a radio, roughly five minutes of concentrated thought, and a really good sun hat for the day of the event. Otherwise, both children and adults of the kid boat fleet take care of themselves and know how to enjoy a a nice long day together on a tropical beach in paradise. Just don't drop the sausage!

PARTICIPANTS THIS YEAR AT THE KID BOAT PARTY
Watcha Gonna Do (Danielle 12, Harrison 10)
Loose Pointer (Adam 15)
Evergreen (Josh 13)
Don Quixote (Jaime 15, Mera 13, Aeron 10)
Phambili (Cameron 10, Anina 15, Naomi 13)
Savannah (Jake 5)
Big Fish (Matt 14, Alex 13, Ayla 11)
Calou (Francois 16, Antoine 13)
Nina (Dave 16)
Rhythm (Joey 17, Olivia 15)
Ceilydh (Maia 9)
Discovery (Claire 12)

Rendezvous in Tahiti

For awhile, it didn't look like we were going to make it. We started late in the season across the Pacific, we stayed a long time enjoying the Marquesas, and we were sucked into The Aquarium with a fascination and pleasure that made it really hard to leave the Tuamotus. Yet ultimately the siren call of other kid boats, free drinks, and dancing girls lured us to Tahiti just in time for the annual Tahiti-Moorea Rendezvous.

The rendezvous is sponsored by a group of organizations from Tahiti, New Zealand, and the United States. The purpose according to Andy Turpin of Latitude 38 is to welcome cruisers to French Polynesia, celebrate our successful crossing, and introduce cruisers to Polynesian culture. Our mission as guests according to the Tahitian tourism folks is to learn all we can and then to go out and encourage other cruisers and tourists to visit the islands. The Kiwis participate because we yachties have to go somewhere when the weather gets ugly, and New Zealand marinas and chandleries would just as soon we turned south instead of continuing west and on to Australia. They told me that there are on average just over 600 cruising yachts making the trek each year not including the mega yachts. This represents a very large chunk of commerce to French Polynesia and no trivial amount to downwind destinations. Figure each non-mega yachts drops at least $2K during a three month transit, and you begin to have some idea why all these varied organizations go to so much trouble.

The effort put into the event was evident this year in the outstanding party enjoyed by all in Moorea. The rendezvous is actually a three day event starting with welcomes, speeches, captains meetings, dancing, music, and cocktails in Papeete. The second day is a rally (not a race!) from Papeete to Moorea. However, when you put two boats in the water anywhere near each other, it's a race. After the non-race, folks gather on the beach for more speeches, cocktails, music and local dancers. The third day, however, is really the centerpiece of the rendezvous. The day includes canoe races, stone lifting, coconut shucking and shredding, fruit tossing/carrying, lei and palm leave crafts, more cocktails, more Tahitian dancers, more island music, more speeches.

We had a fantastic time. All of us had a FANTASTIC time. I'm so tired I can hardly lift my arms to the keyboard, but it was worth every erg of energy. The kids ran like wild animals all over the beach. We had at least 16 kids, probably more but they didn't sit still in one place long enough to get a count. I admit to my usual horrible parenting in that I lost track of all three of my children within about 5 minutes of landing on shore. In fact, I believe it's accurate to say that I checked the dinghy far more frequently than I checked to see whether or not my kids were alive and well.

Somehow, they survived parental neglect, however, and are all back on Don Quixote demanding pasta. Tomorrow, we are hosting a bit of a kid boat party on the beach. The other boats were asking me today what I had planned. These are boat kids. I have nothing planned. The sum total of my plan is to show up with a medical kit, cooked seasoned meat in tubes, bread and condiments. And a book.

And a privacy screen.

Two-fer Mechanique

It is possible... not necessarily true but possible... that we now have two functioning outboard motors. The Evinrude magically fixed itself, again. The Mercury/Mariner has a new carburetor and appears to also be humming along. It is difficult to trust this. Our experience is that outboard motors work really well when you are 5 NM from a certified mechanic. Outside that range, they thumb their outboard-y nose at you. Our plan -- such as it is -- is to test this theory by returning to explore more of Moorea. If the outboards continue to work, we can really and truly declare them fixed.

As anticipated, Papeete is proving to be the City That Stinks But Has Stuff. We're all working very hard to complete an aggressive list of chores. A good fraction of the work is simple cleaning. While I had considered the laundry and drinking water implications of limited fresh water, I hadn't really thought out what it meant in terms of boat cleanliness. What no fresh water means is you have a dirty sticky boat or a sticky boat, but you never have a clean boat. Cleaning with salt water leaves everything with a patina of stinky dampness. It's better than having every surface covered in dirt, dead skin, hair, and baguette crumbs, but only marginally.

The marina at Papeete, however, has a potable drinking water hose available at the dinghy dock. Since our arrival, we've hauled roughly 200 gallons of fresh water on to the boat with which we've cleaned every item of clothing, all the sheets, pillows, and blankets, as well as sluiced down every interior surface. The freezer is defrosted and the fridge washed down, while the pantries have all been emptied, wiped down, and restocked in preparation for reprovisioning. We've scrubbed down both heads, wiped off all the counters, ledges, and horizontal surfaces, scrubbed the stove/oven, emptied out the under sink area and scrapped out the spilled soaps, garbage sludge, and mold. We washed the throw cushions, aired out the salon cushions until they are bone dry, and shaken out all the blankets. Every clothes locker was emptied out, all the clothes either washed or hung up until bone dry and no longer smelling of boat, and the shelves damp washed and dried before putting everything away. The only big task left is the floors and deck. We probably won't do these until right before we leave Tahiti. As long as we're in a big city, we'll just keep putting the dirt back so we'll hold off on that one.

As for the boat, in addition to the outboards, we've been doing other maintenance chores. Fuels -- propane, diesel, and gasoline -- were a high priority. The costs here are insane. Propane is roughly twice what you would pay in Mexico, gasoline is roughly $8USD/gallon and diesel isn't much better. At these prices, DrC and I are utterly bewildered by the amount of traffic on the roads. Environmentalists take note: $8/gal does not seem to keep anyone off the road. It makes no sense whatsoever, but there you have it. However, it will keep Don Quixote on a strict "diesel for anchorages, power, and water" policy. For the most part, this has been our pattern since we left Mexico. As a result, we still have Mexican fuels on board. Unfortunately, there is no avoiding taking on some diesel here as the next fuel stop is Tonga. Even restricting ourselves to water/power/anchor uses, we have gone through roughly half our stores, so safety dictates filling up before we leave. We also may row a lot. So much for fixing the motor. At these prices, rowing looks really good.

DrC has completed one round of hardware store shopping. He came back loaded with bits of this and that which he plans to use to repair, upgrade, tweek, or otherwise screw around on the boat systems. I think I mentioned before that at least to date, we've been very fortunate with our breakage. Unlike many boats out here, we have no huge repairs to make. All those crossed fingers and positive thoughts sent to us over the last few months have apparently proven effective. This leaves DrC working on minor repairs or small issues we've been meaning to address for a long time. For example, our refrigerator does this odd repetitive cycling thing at low power which we think is caused by a power drop along the electrical circuit. He bought new electrical wire and plans to rewrite it today.

For my part, since all our cleaning chores are winding down, after school today will be spent on the Internet. There are the usual family, pictures, bank, credit card chores which are months behind. I also need to complete our residency applications for New Zealand and get the soft copies off to our advisor. Internet access in all of French Polynesia has sucked. Oddly, the best connectivity was in the anchorage at Rangiroa. Here in Tahiti, the connections are so bad I feel like banging my head against the desk every time I try to connect. Today, I'm going to try having a cocktail with an umbrella at the marina restaurant known as the Pink Coconut and see if I can finally get a break. With luck, this will mean new pictures on the flickr account. No pictures today and you can assume I have a large red welt on my forehead.