Hello everyone, as you have seen, recently, most of my blogs have been written in French. To let English speakers read my wonderful blog entries and be able to enjoy my perfect style of writing, etc, etc…  I have decided to write one in English. So here goes:

A few days after meeting Fabien, our new crew, my dad decided to sign us up for the Tahiti Pearl Regatta. It seemed a good idea at the time, spending 5 or 6 hours going really fast and passing everyone and then stopping to go party at the nearest hotel…. What we got was 3 knots of wind that made us go at a fantastic speed of 0.5 knots and then stopping to go eat cold food with no one to talk to. But that was only on the first day ; the next days were better and on the 3^rd day, we were 1^st for about half the race.…  and last for the next half (this is understandable as most of  the boats are tiny boats made especially for regattas)… oh well, let’s consider it a learning experience….

After the prestigious race, we went to Bora-Bora , where we had lots of fun doing our schoolwork… Before leaving, we went to this restaurant called Bloody Mary’s where many stars, including Johnny Depp and Cameron Diaz have eaten (or so it seems…). Only then did we realize that Bora Bora was actually American for “stuff your face as much as you can and stay in 5 star hotels”. There are 46 hotels in Bora Bora. There are so many bungalows over the water, it’s as if some factory had made hundreds of identical bungalows and decided to stick them all in the same place as close as possible. But on the positive side, when you’re a few miles away from the island and you can’t see the hotels and honey-mooners yet, the island is really beautiful; the majestic mountain towers over the crystalline lagoon and when we were approaching the pass, there were dolphins so I guess Bora Bora isn’t that bad if you forget about the tourists (before anybody thinks “but they are tourists!”, we are not tourists, we are merely passing by and if we are tourists at all, we have worked very hard to get there…)

Once the starting shot for the next leg of the World ARC was fired, we started navigating slowly towards the Cook Islands, or to be more precise, towards Aitutaki.

When we arrived at Aitutaki, we had a few hours to spare before high tide with which we would be able to cross the pass so we decided to go snorkeling. The water was amazingly clear from the surface, there were 13 m of water underneath us and we could perfectly see the bottom! In the water, it was even better, there were fish everywhere and the coral was amazing. Bizarrely, the water was much colder than in Polynesia, we were almost shivering, but after a while we got used to it. We crossed the the very shallow pass, with less than 2 cm of water under the boat sometimes. (Nicholas, si tu lis ceci, sache que l’incident de Toao s’est  presque répété et que nous avons pense a toi…)We spent a few days in Aitutaki, exploring the island  and on the last day, Fabien, my Dad and I went diving. It was amazing, no sharks this time but we saw 2 huge sea turtles, a giant clam the size of my sister, a sea snake, and this thing called “ghost coral”. When you touch ghost coral, it’s color changes from purple to white, thus the “ghost”. After  the diving, we explored the whole island with a motorbike and a small car (me or my sister on the motorbike with my dad and me or my sister with my mom and Fabien in the car). As we went further and further, we realized that the island had suffered enormously from a hurricane in February, most of the roofs had been ripped off and even the roofs of the fancy hotels had been replaced by cheap zinc pieces glued together. Apart from that, the island was really beautiful, with beaches and palm trees everywhere. After a while, we ended up on a dirt road that led up to a summit that towered over the island at about 100m. (the highest point on the island reaches an enormous 134m…) we could see the differences of the colors in the turquoise lagoon and the cobalt blue ocean and  we could also see the waves breaking on the reefs with a thundering boom. We left Aitutaki the day after and we are now on our way to Niue ( The translation of Niue in English is “behold coconut”). Only 2 more days!

Ferdinand