Tahiti | Notion

The overnight trip from Fakarava was quite calm and clear with. a full moon. The arrival at Marina Tiana went quite well despite having to go in twice as they hadn’t told us we had to drop anchor as well as pick up ground lines. Laurent, the World ARC agent was on board first thing the next day to organise he work we needed doing: Dinghy leak repair, motor service etc. While we were at it we decided to get a few more clears on the flybridge repaired and four replaced with roll ups for breezes. At the moment you can remove panels but they are big for storing so roll ups will be great.

It was raining most of the first week we were here which limited going out much but there are nice restaurants here and Papeete is only a bus or quick taxi ride away. I went to a medical supply shop that had a depressing range of mobilty/crippled people items – I was glad just to be getting a knee brace!

Great flowers from the Papeete Market

One night there was a huge swell against the marina wall where we are and two of our major rear cleats sheared their anchoring studs off! We were all up three times that night retying lines to the midships cleats (the only ones we had left) and hoping that Lagoon hadn’t under engineered these too! It turned out by light of day that the two biggest had only 8mm studs – we’ve upgraded to 12mm. Even the smaller springer cleats had 14mm??!! Two great guys came and took both cleats off to the engineering shop and solved our problems.

One day we had a commissioning trip out to get our Simrad instruments sorted out once and for all. When we picked the boat up nothing gad been commissioned despite us paying a lot of euros to have it done. Peter and I guessed all the values and parameters and inputted them crossing the Bay of Biscay on the first night! They have never been perfect but we couldn’t find anyone who seemed to know what they should be, including our agents, Lagoon and various other Simrad “experts” around the place. We think it could be contributing to the fact that every now and then we wander off lock when on auto pilot. Very disconcerting. He turned out to be good but we still don’t know if the losing lock on auto pilot thing in still going to happen. I guess we’ll find out, out there!

The weather has not settled in to the dry pattern yet and we have had rain every day – bit boring. Two people we met in The BVI’s in 2018 are here so we’ve caught up with them. Ian and Anne on Tourterelles. They’ve been here 4 months after a lightning strike that took out all electrics and electronics! they told us of an interesting snorkel just off the airport runway of a sunken plane that we looked at.