Spirit of Adventure arrives in Tahiti

Thursday, 10 June 2004

“After the trip to Rarotonga it was nice to relax a little for a while.There's not much on the island, but between the building store and the electrical shop we managed to find most of the things we needed. The fuel truck took a lot of persuading to fill with a pipe across the coastguardboat that we'd moored alongside, and the water hose was about 200mm too short for the starboard tank - nothing that careful aim couldn't fix though. We left last Monday, as the Cook Islands Customs don't work unless you pay them overtime for the weekend. Sigurd and I cleared Customs and Immigration in the morning. It was done in true Cook Islands style, with one A4 form at immigration taking about half an hour to fill in. We waited, ran out of small talk and read all the posters on the walls. In Customs we were waved to seats when we handed the paperwork over, clearly it was going to take a while here too. The whole journey to Tahiti was a little more relaxed, though we nearly didn't leave at all. At low tide there was only 2.6m of water in the harbour, so we cast off and promptly ran aground! Luckily the keel wasn't fully raised, so taking it up 100mm further on the manual override did the trick and we were off. We lowered the keel and finished the rewiring on the limit switches, made a couple of tests and left the harbour. It was a couple of hours before we could get the sails up. Peter's priority was to get the fishing lines rigged and it wasn't long before we were hoping that dinner would arrive on the end of the hooks. We soon settled into life on the ocean again. Sigurd producing fantastic fish casseroles at night and scrambled eggs in the morning. Not so many flying fish, which was disappointing for Peter as he collected them for breakfast. The first couple of days were gentle sailing with only about 10 knots of wind, which gave us plenty of time to check out more of the systems. Initially it was the water-maker that needed attention. Peter had cleaned the filters and it took us a while to get the hang of resetting the high pressure pump and to bleed the air out. The following day we ran out of things to fix, and Peter was running around looking for faults. The sailing was uneventful, we never saw more than 20knots of wind and the sea was pretty flat. It was also all up-hill. I don't think we ever got an apparent wind of more than 50 degrees, mostly it was 30-35. Peter was eventually persuaded that using the keel to cant the boat the wrong way in light air was the way to go. Another win for the keel! We were heading straight for Bora Bora, which is meant to be one of the most beautiful islands, but with time running out for me to catch my flight, we had tack away to head for Moorea instead. We cruised into Opunohu Bay at 4am with a flat sea and full moon. There were only a couple of other yachts there so we could choose our anchorage. It was completely calm and the mountains were silhouetted against the sky, it was so light we didn't even need torches. We had a great breakfast of bacon and eggs and then jumped into the water to test the bathing platform and boarding ladder. First swim since we'd left Auckland, finally the water was warm enough.” Opunohu Bay as pictured for those readers that don’t know is one of the classic anchorages of the world and where Captain Cook rested his ship Resolution on his third circumnavigation. The scene with the tell tale craggy hills in the background was depicted in the famous painting by the Resolution’s artist William Hodges. Peter on his previous circumnavigation had a picture of his old yacht in exactly the same spot. In Richard Hough’s biography of Cook, Opunohu Bay is described thus: “Here was a paradise beyond compare. Clear streams and a river flowed into the bay, the slopes were a mass of flowers and flowering shrubs, fruit of every description was for the picking and the waters teemed with fish.” More later from our own correspondent in a grass skirt shortly.

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