Day 243, Year 1: Living at Anchor in French Polynesia
Date: Saturday, June 17, 2006
Weather: Not Recorded
Location: Cook’s Bay, Moorea (Society Islands, French Polynesia)
We have been here for six days and each day has been wonderful. I think Moorea has just the right mix of beauty, tradition, and modern conveniences to make it a very comfortable place to stay. The businesses here follow island time and close at midday. That is still hard for us to get used to, but I think it is a good thing. Everything closes from noon and reopens two or three hours later. Life is easy here. I’m sure things will change when we cross the channel and go to Tahiti, but we know this place is only ten miles away. If Tahiti gets too rowdy, we’ll just head back here.
Today was a “work on the boat” day. We started out by taking out every single can of food from all of their hiding places aboard. We decided that it was time to access what we have and update the spreadsheets. When we started out we had everything logged into a spreadsheet, but as we traveled we sometimes forgot to record when we used things. This update will help us decide what we need to buy while we are in Tahiti where prices are high, but not as high as in the out islands. We are just a little more than half way to New Zealand, so it is a good time reassess. We still have cans of food sitting around and we will finish this job tomorrow. Around 11 AM we headed into the Bali Hai to walk to the internet café. It always closes at noon and reopens at 1:30, but I figured it would close at noon today and not open again until Saturday–right assumption. But we got there in time to download our land-based e-mail and send a couple of picture files to friends, but I was not able to send more picture files to the website. That will have to wait until we are in Papeete. On the way back we stopped at a local pottery place. The displays were beautiful, but very expensive.
When we returned to Windbird, we got into cleaning mode. The bottom and waterline of the boat gets an incredible amount of growth out here. And the growth creeps onto the white topsides. Every couple of weeks we have to do a major cleaning. This requires that Mark gets in to the water using our Snuba gear and dives under the boat to clean. I stay in the dinghy and clean around the waterline. It is hard and exhausting work. I guess this is our payment for living here in paradise. Not easy, but the return is certainly worth it.
We finished this work at about 5:00 PM here and decided to call our kids back in Massachusetts. We knew our son was visiting with our daughter this weekend and thought we could talk to both at the same time. We thought we had a five hour difference, but it is six hours. It was 11 PM in Massachusetts, but the kids were still up watching a tape of the US versus Italy World Cup Match today. It was wonderful talking with them even though the Satellite connection was broken. The kids had planned to call us tomorrow for Father’s Day, but we beat them to it. We had no idea that tomorrow was Father’s Day. Those things fall through the cracks out here.
Tomorrow we will finish repacking all of the canned goods and finish cleaning the bottom of the boat. At 6 PM, Tom, BetteLee, and Katherine from Quantum Leap will come over for dinner. We plan to watch South Pacific and see if we can identify any of the landscapes. Moorea is the mythical Bali Hai in that movie and I think Bora Bora is the site of the main airstrip. It will be fun to see if we recognize any of the scenery.
