Today Christi started the day by grudgingly performing a rain dance. Out came the brush, soap and hose. It always worked with the car, maybe it would work with the boat. She only washed the areas most in need of a good scrubbing, clinging to the hope that the rain dance would work and Mother Nature would take care of the rest. Oh, and Brad from Special Blend retrieved our ropes for us. Thank you Brad! Continue reading
Wednesday June 6, 2007 — We went to meet Richard at the fancy hotel. We arrived early to explore the island with the hotel. There is an airport (complete with a passenger loading/unloading boat dock), three little souvenir shops selling jewelry made with locally raised black water pearls, and a couple of houses. The houses are farther apart than in town and have no fences. The views of the lagoon are beautiful. There are a lot of dragonflies around, too. We were surprised at the amount of trash strewn about. In addition to the usual bottles and cans, we saw a lot of broken sandals and buoys.
Back at the hotel, we watched some workers put a palm frond roof on a bungalow. There is a basic wooden frame. It looks like the two halves of the palm fronds are braided about a third of the way down from the stem. The fronds are laid down and nailed at the stem to the frame. The fronds are laid down a few inches apart and overlap one another. The fronds are covered with chicken wire to keep them from blowing away. Continue reading
Wednesday May 30, 2007 We pulled into the Bay of Virgins on Fatu Hiva, Marquesas, French Polynesia, at 8:30. As promised, it is beautiful. Fatu Hiva gets the most rain, and is thus the most lush. The original name for the bay the Marquesans gave it was Bay of the Phalli, because there are several rock formations that do resemble penises of various shapes and sizes. Rumor has it the missionaries were unhappy with that name (Baie des Verges in French) and changed it to the Bay of Virgins (Baie des Vierges just added an “I”).
Like Anaho, Fatu Hiva is extremely difficult for tourists to get to without a private boat. There is no airport and no regular ferry to take tourists to and from here. There are two towns connected by a road that is mostly dirt. There are a little over 500 people on the island. Like Nuka Hiva, steep mountains just shoot out of the water with little flat ground. Continue reading
Saturday, May 26, 2007 – Today is the last time we will be able to send pictures for a few weeks. Currently, we are in “civilization” where there is an internet café’ (it is a slow and somewhat inconsistent connection, but it is something). Tomorrow we will be heading out to go island hopping. It is extremely unlikely that we will find an internet café on any island between here and Tahiti. So, back to text only updates. Continue reading
To begin with, here are a couple photos from our days at sea. We didn’t get many nice sunsets, but the few we got were beautiful. We also had a huge rainbow around the boat the days it rained.
We dropped anchor at 6:00 am local time on May 19, just as the sun was coming up (8:30 am PST). The view of Taiohae was just as we had seen in photos. Continue reading