Sailing Evenstar

We are chasing the clock somewhat. Our original plan had us already in Fiji by now.  So after a regretful and rushed farewell to Huahine we set sail to Raiatea. The wind kicked in nicely for the downwind trip. We tried to get one of the spinnaker poles deployed; but like everything on the boat we try for the first time, there was an issue. It dropped out of it's mast fitting and nearly brained Paul. Sandrine had a good belly laugh at this, it appears she's a fan of physical comedy.  So we lashed the pole to the deck and continued on our way to Raiatea. The headsail was a bit unstable though.  Once we were settled, Sandrine invited her friend Marie Claire over for dinner. It was fun chatting away in hybrid pidgin French and English, it got easier with the second bottle of Bordeaux.   Marie Claire was a teacher in Reunion, then when the kids were grown she divorced her husband, sold everything and bought a yacht which she sails all over French Polynesia by herself. She...

It had all gotten a bit hard to find some friends to help sail Evenstar to Fiji. So with mixed feelings we signed up for an internet site: Crewbay.   We had a few good phone and zoom chats with prospective crew members. Sandrine emerged as a front-runner, so we offered to host her for a night aboard in Moorea to get acquainted. We all got on well and agreed she would make a great addition to the crew for our passage to Fiji.  Sandrine is quite a formidable person. She is a cyclist, mountaineer, sailor, paraglider and PhD qualified geologist on a mission to sail and cycle around the world, whilst maintaining a minimum carbon position. Along the way she plans to climb mountains and fly off them. The story of her trip is here: https://untourdaile.com/ .  So we headed back to Papeete for more num numb time in the lagoon. Our first stop was to the fuel dock at Taina to fill the tanks and collect Sandrine, including bags and reclined bicycle.   The Sturgeon Full Moon ...

We have the itch to move on; but we need our boom fixed.  We are waiting on a guy called Paco to pull it all together. He looks and sounds like Eli Wallach in the Good, the Bad and the Ugly. He had a great understanding of the engineering issues but it was a bit slow to get going.  Ultimately though, how could you not have confidence in a guy that looks like Eli.  So while we wait for that, we are saying goodbye to Moorea before we head to Fiji. After our circuitous path to open water SSI certification, we needed to break the seal on our first autonomous dive. We worked our way through the new gear, hooned out in the dinghy through the Opunohu Bay pass to the buoys outside the reef, and made fast. Once we dived in, there were all sorts of strange underwater sounds. We quickly realised it was the whales talking, maybe the mother and calf that had shared Cooks bay with us a few days before. They'd been leaping out of the water not that far offshore as we headed in to Opunoh...

 It was great to head home for a two week whistle stop visit. It had been 3 months and I was starting to feel a little homesick and missing everyone.  I left Easso in Cooks bay with the anchor firmly bedded in, but also with the uneasy knowledge that 2 weeks alone on a complicated vessel in a foreign land was a challenge. There is a 7 day anchoring time limit, and the disaffected locals might take a dim view of the boat being there longer than that.   On arrival in Sydney, the cold and rain were a shock at first; but then I remembered my appreciation for the seasons. It's good to have the cycles of change. However, the cold always gets me thinking of my treasured annual family ski trip.  I had no time for such frivolities this year (because of my commitment to my South Pacific ones) and I feared that they had already flown the coop for good.  Finbar was moving out and Sholto also has his own plans. Cathe was fighting off a winter flu and already gearing up ...