17.08S 150.22W Saturday 10^th May 2.00am   Finally we have left Papeete (again) and are now on route, overnight, to Huahine Island which is still in the Society Archipelago but one of the Leeward Islands as opposed to the Windward where Tahiti and Morea are situated – with Zippy’s starboard light glowing in the dark beside us! 

In fact, our water maker parts didn’t clear Customs in Tahiti until Tuesday so, rather than incur more marina costs than we needed to, we stayed in Opunohu Bay in Moorea until we could collect our spares – sailing over as soon as we heard the ‘all clear’.  Fabulous anchorage with great snorkling and crystal clear waters.

Mantaray near the beach

Very relaxed here……..

As you can imagine, sending spare parts half way around the world via New Zealand, are bound to come with frustrations attached! I attach a succession of email correspondence for you to get the gist………

Email 1 (from the Custom’s Agent)

Dear Sir, Madame,

We received a pkg for the SV ANAHI, this pkg has been hold by the PF custom for clearance, could you please contact us at 453645 for clearance assistance ?

Many thanks for your king assistance, Taiana

Email 2 (From the Custom’s Agent)

Dear Sir, Madame, We only need you to email the request documents or fax it them to us at the below fax number

You won't have to come to PPTA location we can send you the shipment by a local courier who will need to have from you a local contact phone number. If you are unable to give us that information please let us know and we will work out for another solution, Taiana

Email 3 (From Anahi)

Hi Taiana, Thank you for letting me know by email that the package will clear customs later today, Tuesday.  We are still anchored in Moorea but will sail back to the Taina Marina, Papeete tomorrow morning, Wednesday 7^th May, so please let the courier know we will be there by 14.00 hrs to collect delivery - we can be contacted on VHF 72 - just call Anahi Anahi Anahi and we will respond. Thank you.  Regards Harriet and Paul Hayes.

Email 4 (Received just as we berthed in Taina Marina, Papeete, Tahiti!)

Hi Harriet and Paul,

Yes shipment has been cleared from customs and will be delivered to you by Moorea Service Express - we have first to contact them and then they will deliver it to Moorea. I'm not to sure if they speak English but we have to try.

The package did eventually track us down at 1900 hrs on Wednesday night – goodness knows how far it had travelled! 

Although we hadn’t been looking forward to retracing our steps and returning to Papeete we rang the changes by berthing in Taina Marina for two nights (rather than the town pontoons where we were before) and made really good use of our time there.  With copious amounts of fresh water and shore electricity we did all our laundry and scrubbed the decks, managed to get our Australian Visas electronically, stocked up on absolute essentials in the Carrefour supermarket (probably the most expensive food shopping I have ever encountered) and miraculously found a resident refrigerator engineer who lives on his boat anchored in the bay and who managed to fix our dormant fridge by cannibalising the far superior 25 year old dysfunctional cold plate!  He is even going to send a thermostat to Raiatea Island for our collection when we get there…. It doesn’t get much luckier than that in this part of the world!

There were quite a few Rally boats still held up in the Marina with us still effecting repairs of one sort or another , Zippy for one, Shuala III, Penelope III, Baccus, Cayuko, Jenny, Miss Styx, Fine Fleur and Tapestry. Sadly, Blue Raven have left the Rally – they had commitments at home and felt the pace of the Rally was too fast for them……..they will be really missed.

We have had a really pleasant, gentle sail across to Huahine and were joined by dolphins just before we entered the Avamoa Pass to sail down the length of the island inside the reef.

Every now and then they would turn on their sides to get a better look at us!