Bali Hai Moonrise

Blue Sky's Voyage
George & Michael
Mon 28 Jun 2010 20:01
Hello Friends                            "17:29.2S 149:52.7W"
 
It seems ages since the last blog and sure enough, it's 5 weeks ago. So what's been happening to Blue Sky whilst the blog readers complaints have been arriving?
 
Michael flew back to the UK for 2 weeks and did some catching up with the family. After he booked the ticket, the plotter went on the blink so he took that back to Raymarine's head office to get it fixed while in the UK. The Raymarine people were gloriously efficient and the plotter is now fine and has a year's warranty!
 
His return flight was more interesting, as the Tahitians - including the firemen at the airport in Papeete - had staged a strike, apparently for "better political and economic stability". One wonders why they didn't ask for nicer weather and free beer whilst they were listing their troubles... Anyway the upshot of a handful of people holding the island to ransom was that about 5,000 tourists were stuck on Tahiti and Michael spent a couple of nights in LA before getting back to Blue Sky.
 
So far as we're aware, no progress has been made on achieving anything in the political or economic line, though presumably 5,000 tourists now have rather worse memories of Tahiti than would otherwise have been the case, so that's probably made some difference to the economic prospects, though not in the desired direction.
 
Whilst Michael was away, George supervised the completion of repairs to the sails and deck canvas, so everything is looking a bit tidier. We also welcomed Greg from Chicago, our latest crewmember and then spent several more days on the dock as a 'Maramu' went through. The Maramu is a regular strong wind - I guess a bit like the Mistral in Southern France, though the Maramu comes from the south.
 
Eventually the weather cooperated and we sailed very gently across to Moorea, a voyage of all of 15 miles, but a suitable start for Greg who is being introduced to the joys of sailing.
 
Moorea has better anchoring inside the reef and we found a comfortable spot right away, though it turned out to have a touch of road noise. Here's the view in the evening light across towards the Bali Hai hotel where 'South Pacific' was filmed many years ago.
 
 
 
We met up with our Panama Canal buddies 'Tumshi' again and moved to the next bay west which was quieter and equally beautiful. Some snorkelling was managed and a fair bit of hammock time was clocked up.
 
Since Greg is only with us until late July and since the weather forecast was perfect, we sailed over the weekend up to Rangiroa in the Tuamotus, a touch over 200 miles in 28 hours of glorious sailing. We didn't make Greg do a solo night watch, but we did wake him up at 0230 so he could have the full experience of coming on watch in the middle of the night!
 
So we're now somewhat distant from the dot on the google map, but we'll do a blog about Rangiroa in the next few days and get the dot in the right place.
 
Best Wishes from Rangiroa
 
George, Michael and Greg