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
May 25, 2007 We want to begin with a correction to a previous blog post. The statues in the park along the water were carved in 1989 for a festival celebrating the Marquesan culture. We guess the park already existed and they permanently put the statues at the park location. The 2000 year old statues are mentioned below.
On Friday, we got up early and went into shore. We went back to the gas station to take care of the fuel tax exemption paperwork and pay. Then we took a guided tour of Nuka Hiva in a 4×4 with a local tour guide, Dean Richard that speaks excellent English.
They only began putting roads on the islands in 1981. Parts of the island are still only accessible by boat. The roads that exist are mostly dirt. They are actively working on making new roads and paving the existing ones. We have seen work crews doing both. We were glad to be chauffeured because we would have not been too comfortable driving those steep, muddy mountain roads. Continue reading
May 22, 2007 – On Tuesday morning we awoke early in eager anticipation. We were going on an all day horse back ride through the mountains of Nuka Hiva. It was supposed to be beautiful and we were looking forward to it. Christi had managed to make reservations over the phone in French, which is quite a feat. It was raining a little bit as we got ready and dinghied in, but the rain did not concern us. It has rained every day so far and has not lasted very long.
Our tour guide, Patrice, met us at the dinghy landing. Patrice has traditional face and arm tattoos that are really cool. Despite the intimidating looking tattoos 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
The crew is healthy and happy. We had no system failures, and overall it was a great passage. We really appreciate everyone’s support. Seeing land after 21 days at sea is as wonderful as you would expect. Nuka Hiva is beautiful sight. We have lots to do, so look for more of a recap later. Land ho!
The numbers: We traveled 2835 miles on about 1000 gallons in 500 hours. That means 5.67 knots, 2.83 miles per gallon, and 2.00 gallons per hour.