Peggy & Pat's Sailing Adventures
April 20 – May 1 Our time in French Polynesia is coming to a close. We arrived nearly two years ago in the Marquesas and have had many great times. But if your boat stays longer than two years, you need to pay an import tax that would come to tens of thousands of dollars. So we needed to be
April 13 – 20 This post is going to be a list of boat jobs that have come up recently. Not so exciting. I won’t be hurt if you don’t read to the end. 😉 Every time you are going to start your engines, you check a number of things. One of those is the fan belt. I noticed the
We spend a lot of time provisioning and finding boat parts. As we don’t have a car and taxis can be hard to find, we have been hitch-hikking and it works really well in Raiatea. On April 15 we were picked up by 3 French people and found that they were from the boat Nemo. Two days earlier, the crew
After a fun time with Dr Rick, it was time to get back to boat jobs. Lots to do. First, our ice maker had been causing a GFCI outlet to trip, so I rewired things to prevent that. Refrigeration systems are notorious for short spikes each time the compressor restarts and this can trip the GFCI. We did make time
On April 3 we woke to a nice, sunny morning with a bit of a breeze but not too much. If you zoom in on the map, we were at the purple place-mark on the left side of Taha’a, near the Coral Gardens and the ‘Le Taha’a Island Resort & Spa. The resort is supposed to be the fanciest thing
On March 29 we met Rick at the ferry terminal in Huahine. Rick is a retired Air Force doctor, like Peggy, and they have known each other for years, having met during their medical residency. Peggy has many great memories of time she has spent with Rick, his wife Jeanette (also a doctor) and their children. Rick has always wanted
After relaxing and touring, it was back to work! Monday we moved to another place, again about 3 km away from RC. This place had a pool, making it easier to handle the heat. I rented a bike to make the trip to RC easier. Still not trivial, including a hill at the end that was steep enough I did
On the morning of March 18, Raiatea Carenage (RC) told us they could do our haulout that afternoon. So we pulled anchor and motored over (orange path from last photo of previous post). About 3pm they were ready and we tied up at their ramp. They have a VERY impressive lift system that is capable of handling boats much larger
On March 11 we pulled anchor from Tapuamu Bay and went around the northern part of Taha’a. After going almost 15 nm (in yellow below) we anchored near another snorkeling area that is also called ‘Coral Gardens’. We got in the dinghy and headed there (red line on map) for a really nice few hours of drifting with the fish.
Early on March 9, we pulled anchor and motored about 10 nm to Tapuamu Bay on the west side of Taha’a, the island just north of Raiatea. The bay is pretty deep very close to shore so we were happy to find a mooring ball we could tie up to. Otherwise we would have had to drop the anchor in