Another update from Tahiti

Seaduced
John & Jane Craven
Sat 17 May 2014 04:27
Yesterday, Friday, we woke up to a set back - the UPS tracking site said that the second parcel had been rejected by the receiver and that other packages had therefore been returned to sender! Sarah from Discovery had sent a very apologetic email saying that they could get the parts again by Wednesday 21/5 and that shipping here would take a further week - to say we were disappointed would be the understatement of the century!!! Selden had also been told this and so were all ready to send another set out.
You can imagine our surprise when 30 minutes later we had both parcels delivered to the dock!!! Fortunately as it was Friday night in Europe nothing had been sent out again. The UPS tracking is appalling and everyone at Discovery and Selden were running round in circles in Europe while we slept on oblivious to it all!
Anyway, the forestay was reassembled yesterday and re-hoisted up the mast in the afternoon. There was no rigger to go up the mast and it was far beyond me to reconnect the forestay. Fortunately, Augusto from Clementina, someone we met when we crossed the Atlantic in 2010 and who is on another boat in the rally, sailed in with Laurent the shipping agent we are using here, in the afternoon and he offered to go up this morning. The electrics are now connected and we hope to get the sail up in the next hour.

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The new forestay arriving by supermarket trolley no less!

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Augusto went up to fasten it all together at the top of the mast

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The rig was then tensioned again

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A beautiful sunset over Moorea, hopefully we will not be here to see this again - fingers crossed!

Our amended plan is this. We will leave here tomorrow, Sunday, then stop off in Huahine for a couple of nights so we can celebrate my birthday. We only wanted a short sail to try everything out before we go too far. We will then set off straight to Niue and will probably arrive next weekend all things being equal. If we don't manage to catch up with the rally there, we will almost certainly be at the next rendezvous in Tonga on 2 June.

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