Bloody Mary's
Rhiann Marie - Round the World
Stewart Graham
Thu 1 Jul 2010 02:07
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Wednesday June 30 0724 local time 1724
UTC
16:21.88S 152:16.08W
We are now a few hours into our 700 mile passage to
Suwarrow in the northern Cooks and we have a steady 20+ knots of wind and a
following swell - from directly behind us. Anyway this is better than in front
of us so we are hoping for some reasonable speed to our destination before the
wind dies down as is forecast after the first two days. Let's see what
happens!
It is of course more than a little premature to
have this conversation but we havebeen so blown away with the Polynesian Islands
from Marquesas to Bora Bora that we were even speaking las night about doing it
again and of course spennding much more time in these places which would mean
spreading the trip over many years and doing it in stages. We have no plans of
this at the moment and apart from anything else I need to make sure I still have
a job when I get back and in fact that we get back - safely.
Although Bora Bora is undoubtedly very commercially
developed we still felt we could find wild and beautiful anchorages, snorkel and
dive the reefs and go spear fishing. So for us despite some previous reervations
about it being very commercialised we had a great time there. Of course it
may make Norwegian prices look cheap but one can also be very self sufficient
and snorkelling and exploring need not cost anything. A visit to Bloody Mary's
however does.
Bloody Mary's ( named after, if I remeber
correctly, a Vietnamese female character in a south pacific movie) is set
on the edge of a bay in the south west side of Bora Bora and is amazing. It is a
legendary restaurant and bar and has a sand floor with all the furniture made
out of coconut tree wood which is stunning. It is very high end and very high
end priced too. It was originally very basic and was created as a location for
all the greaty and the good staying in the Bora Bora hotel to slip away of an
evening from under the gaze of fellow guests. The front of the restaurant
features two large hanging wooden boards with the names off all
the famous people who had visited it. It is unbelievable, but Rod
Stewart, Marlon Brando, Charlton Heston, the Rockefeller's, the
supermodels, the rock stars, the politicians etc etc - you get the picture.
We were hoping to get our names on there as they didn't seem to have any creel
makers yet, but, well they had run out of space on the board, and anyway they
had no paint and even if we had been asked we wouldn't have allowed our names to
be on the board anyway - so they can just shove it! Bloody Mary's - bloody
good but bloody expensive.
My left wrist is giving me a bit of hassle
right now and the other day when diving one of my fingers on my left hand was
blue and numb - wierd. We are keen to do a lot more diving and will get our own
gear soon and eventually maybe a compressor aboard but for now until we have a
lot more experience we will stick with the professional dive
operators.
The seas are now building further round about us
and we seem to be encountering a little counter current as we are just passing
north of Maupiti (where we had hoped to visit before the Suwarrow brain wave) so
I better go and pay attention to the sails.
We are currently sailing in "white out" conditions
- Genoa poled out to windward, jib set to leeward and main to leward with
preventer fitted. We now have a force 6 almost behind us and 3 -
4 metre following seas so we are romping along at a steady 11
knots!
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