August

We left Rangiroa on Friday morning and got into Tahiti about noon Saturday. It was a great sail, although when the wind lightened, we motor-sailed for several hours to get into Papeete early enough to rent a car. The pass at Rangiroa was something else. We left when it was supposed to be slack water, but since it had been pretty windy for several days prior, the pass was actually ebbing (water/current running out of the pass). Since the wind was going into the pass, this made for large, standing waves on the outside end of the pass, of ~10 feet. An amazing amount of green water, and I got soaked driving the boat, even though we had a hard dodger. At least it is a short pass, so we only had about 5 minutes that were pretty tense. Our friends, Emile and Zenya, were with us, and took the adventure well! We had a couple of great dives with a local dive shop. Emile got his CMAS dive certification while he was here. 'Lucky' Emile had several extraordinary dives, with turtles, dolphin, lots of sharks including a large hammerhead and a very large silver tip, etc., etc. Eric and Paula spent about a week and a half with us in Rangiroa. We had a super great time with them. They played tennis almost every day for about 2+ hours! We also snorkeled, swam, windsurfed, suba'd, rode bikes, walked around the atoll and, of course, had some great meals, including wine. It easy to get lazy out here, but the kids kept us busy and active. We miss having them with us.

My brother meets us here in ~1.5 weeks, sailing to Moorea with us. We have a few boat tasks to do, re-provisioning, catching up with friends on other boats, and we'll be doing some more diving. The last few days have been pretty windless, which is great for sleeping and diving, but the days get pretty hot. We usually turn on the air-conditioning for a few hours and do some reading, drawing, etc.

The pics here show:

We've been in Papeete a little over a week now. Its the big city, at least for 17 deg South, 150 deg West...the crossroads of the South Pacific. The answer to every question among the cruisers for the last few months regarding provisioning, repairs, restuarants, banks, mail, etc...has always been "When we get to Papeete....". Papeete is reminiscent of cities like Nice in the south of France....small twisty streets, lots of motor scooters, lots of nice small shops and...unfortunately a bunch of noise and smog. We've been doing a bunch of boat chores...changing oil, greasing winches, replacing a broken window in the dodger, replacing the broken block in the clew of the mainsail, etc...Also doing serious provisioning since we are anchored right off of the largest supermarket for around 2000 miles. We've also done two scuba dives, one outside of the pass off of the village of Punaauia and the other on a seaplane and shipwrek inside the lagoon, right nice to the airport. Our friends Chris and Marcus are very happy to have their scuba compressor fixed. Its been broken since Fakarava and we've been filling their tanks for them. They took it to the place where all of the pearl farms get work done on their compressors and lo and behold it was fixed the next day. The only tricky part was a 4 mile dingy ride with a 100 lb piece of very non waterproof equipment.