First day in Fatu Hiva,,,,
Rogue
Alan and Noi not sure which is which
Thu 16 Apr 2009 19:44
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First day in Fatu Hiva,,,,
Arrived at, Bay des Verges, the bay of phalli
(allegedly the original name) which was not surprisingly quickly renamed by the
missionaries, they sneakily added an i to make it Vierges or the bay of virgins.
Anyway, speculation aside, it has been renamed yet again and is now called
Hanavave and I have no idea whatsoever what it means, a bit scared to
ask!
We arrived at the same time, within 5 minutes , of
the cat we had passed 3 days ago. We offered to let them in first as they would
be able to anchor in shallower water. The Captain said it wasn’t a matter of us
letting him go first, he was ahead of us so we had to let him go first. ANYWAY….
We followed him in. he managed to drag his anchor and snag two other cats which
resulted in 3 boats tangled together and drifting to the rocks. After picking
myself up off the floor with stitches in my side from laughing so hard we
watched the performance for the next two ours. When we were finally able to go
in to set our anchor there wasn’t anywhere to set it in reasonable depth so we
moved round to the other bay.
The Other Bay is not popular due to poor holding
and rolling. We managed to anchor up fine and had a very pleasant
night.
During the afternoon we were approached by a
fishing boat with two guys wearing full cammo gear, including what looked like
cammo balaclavas. Turns out they were decked out in cammo wet suits, they had a
boat load of spear guns and one of them started waving a glove and pointing
fingers back and forth indicating a swap. We were still in the process of
anchoring so I couldn’t give it my full attention but to my mind he wanted to
trade fish for gloves. Strange I thought! So off we go raking through lockers
and such looking for something suitable to swap. Can’t find anything new so
offer him a couple of pair of very well used sailing gloves. Grinning from ear
to ear they head off, with no exchange of fish! Tomorrow they said! never to be
seen again I think! 21:00 and pitch black we hear someone knocking on the hull.
Out we pop to be faced with a couple of cammo decked spear fishermen. They hand
me the gloves back and plop a very large sweet lips fish on our deck, say Merci
and off they go. Turns out the guy had forgotten one of his gloves when they set
off and couldn’t go fishing with only one, he only wanted to borrow a
glove.
An excellent introduction to French Polynesia. The
other really great thing is that their French is nearly as bad as mine so
everything is done in pidgin. Causes mass confusion as you can see but at least
I don’t feel like an idiot try to remember schoolboy
French.
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