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
|