Gorgeous day on the east side of Raiatea

by Andrew and Clare Payne on 24 May 2017 We are enjoying a gorgeous day at anchor behind a small island on the east side of Raiatea. A little piece of paradise in flat calm water with beautiful views of the mountains and the surrounding reef. Both water and air temperature at 28 degrees makes life very pleasant.

Happy to be at Anchor

We have friends on ‘’Plastic Plankton’’ and ‘’Flying Cloud’’ transiting from French Polynesia to Tonga expecting up to 40 knots, four metre waves and torrential rain. Also ‘’Tactical Directions’’ transiting from New Zealand to Fiji is slowing down to avoid the same Low Pressure System which is passing through Fiji to Tonga. It doesn’t sound much fun and the weather map looks quite scary, we are very happy to be here safe and sound.

Some Problems

Our only aggravation is that Andrew’s Master Card is declining payments but in fact the payments are going through. When Andrew paid the boatyard for six months storage the MC declined the payment so Andrew paid by Visa. However on our bank statement both payments are showing. So as you can imagine we have spent quite an amount of time trying to rectify the problem.

Numerous phones calls to MC find us dealing with electronic prompts or being placed in a queue. Not at all satisfactory when calling from overseas. It is not over yet but we are hoping it will resolve itself this week. The MC declined a second time for a smaller amount (but the payment went through) so it seems that Andrew’s MC will be unusable for the rest of the season, which is a bit of a blow.

Fun with Friends

We were scheduled to have a pot luck dinner with twenty cruising friends last Sunday, but it was postponed due to rain. So we invited Mark and Cheryl on French Curve to have pot luck on Eye Candy. It was a good night as we haven’t seen Mark and Cheryl since last season. They are now on the hard preparing their boat to go west across the Pacific. The following night with improved weather the pot luck dinner went ahead at Apooiti Marina. Another good night, we meet some lovely people, all enjoying life to the full.

Hard Yakka

We have now been around to the main town of Uturoa and provisioned the boat. Many walking trips later visiting every supermarket both in and out of town, we now have the basics. We discovered weevils in the rice, pasta and flour products, so these we either did not buy, threw out or manually sifted the product and killed the little devils. After that we got rid of all cardboard and vacuum packed just about everything that didn’t come in a tin. We have learnt that vacuum packing is the only way to stay on top of the problem. So just remember when you drive to your local supermarket and pick up good quality food in one visit; you live in a great country, so enjoy.

So What’s Next

This morning I am washing the bed linen and baking bread, hopefully without weevils. Andrew is varnishing parts of the navigation table. Twice now he has touched the freshly painted area by accident, cursed and then laughed. I think we need a big Wet Paint sign. We haven’t made any definite plans yet for the season. We will wait for the sea to settle down before we venture outside our lovely lagoon.