Category Archives: Information

Information we discovered during our travels.

A Peek at Marquesan Culture

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May 27, 2007 On Sunday morning we decided to go to church. The tourist guides all said that Polynesians are deeply religious people and everyone goes to church. Dean Richard, our guide, said that was true in his grandparent’s day, but nowadays it was socially acceptable to not attend church. The tourist guides all said the singing was amazing and worth a visit on a Sunday morning.

The Catholic Cathedral we had visited the night before had very high wooden ceilings, rock walls, and lots of statues and crucifixes. The church could have held at least a couple hundred people and there were maybe 40 at the Saturday night service. Everyone sat attentively. The service was in Marquesan. The singing was really beautiful, as promised. The priest and alter boy were dressed in white robes. Since we wandered in out and while the service was going on, we had no contact with the church goers. Continue reading →

Traditional Marquesan Feast

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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 →

Special Blend and Getting Fuel

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May 23 to May 24, 2007 – Wednesday was a really mellow day. We had gotten in from dinner late on Tuesday, so on Wednesday we slept late. We spent most of the day tiding and doing some laundry. Tidying is another one of those chores that sounds easy enough, but is laborious on a boat. Putting things back often means pulling everything out of a storage area and repacking it all back in because it needs to be packed in a certain order. As we use up things, spaces open up that need to be repacked so things don’t move around within the storage space. We often need to shuffle things from one storage area to another, causing both areas have to be completely pulled out and repacked.

Around 09:30, “Special Blend”, another Nordhavn 43, pulled in and
anchored (translation: parked) near us. They came from Florida, through the Panama Canal, and departed for the Marquesas from the Galapagos. Eric took the dinghy over to visit them, and also went and introduced himself to some people on another nearby power boat. Special Blend is in the foreground and Kosmos is in the background and another one with Kosmos on the left: Continue reading →

Around Taiohae Bay

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Sunday, May 20 – We all slept late and lounged around in the morning. It felt really good to have nothing we absolutely had to do. Don’t get us wrong we have plenty of boat chores that need to get done, but they could wait.

Eric went for a ride in the dinghy and met some people that were hanging out on their boats. One boat had some mechanical failures with their autopilot and generator. In losing their generator, they also lost their water maker. They had to steer by hand for 7 days (not fun) and could not shower for almost two weeks (eeeewwww). That made us very thankful for the fact that we had absolutely no failures or problems in our time at sea.

At lunch time we all dinghied in to land to go out to eat. As we were walking down the street, Eric recognized Continue reading →

Welcome to Nuka Hiva, French Polynesia

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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 →