Monday 4 September – moments of sun in Tahaa

Rowan had a 3:30 am phone call which shortened the morning sleep a bit, he is a much better early bird than I am. After breakfast Rowan dinghied over to Raiatea to pick up a guy he had found on a blog somewhere that could install his Fish Finder – this is not to find fish but to be able to look out for coral bommies when anchoring or going through shallow water. Cleverly it can scan through the bottom of the boat without having to drill a hole! Rowan returned pretty drenched, it is a couple of miles across pretty open waters at least it was within the reef. I think Rowan was rather surprised to pick up this 72 year old white haired Canadian. There is something in me that gets very nervous when you have hundreds of wires and somebody wants to cut into them. Hopefully he knows what he is doing! Sadly in the end the device needed a new app or something, so although installed it isn’t working! Poor Rowan and in the process he lost his prescription sunglasses overboard.

Meanwhile I had a lovely time chatting to the girls on a combined called with Dani and Noah in Sweden, sadly no Luke. Dani has just bought an old property on Lake Balaton for them to do up, it looks gorgeous and will be an amazing holiday home, very exciting for them.

After lunch we went on shore, we visited the Peal farm whose mooring ball we are attached too. It was a lovely setting and we were given a very good talk, our 4th one now, but we felt obliged to listen as that is our payment for the ball. They had lovely coloured pearls but pretty pricey. Luckily there was a group of 8 Americans on a charter and they looked like they might spend some serious money.

We turned right onto the coastal road to look for a bakery, we never found it but it was a lovely walk and good to stretch our legs. We walked the other way to visit a Vanilla farm but gave up on that too. The wind picked up and the predictions were for it to blow quite hard, luckily we are pretty sheltered even though we are the boat furthest out.

The coast road

Our scenic walk

Lovely colourful well kept gardens, everywhere is so neat and tidy, they are really very proud friendly people

Someones garden, hoping it is not a grave so close to the water

Those clouds hung over us all day but only a little rain today thank goodness

On the way back to PolePole, Rowan saw this enormous Catana Catamaran coming in, he had been given the owners details by his Catana 53 Owner’s group. Turns out this guy, Vincent is a kind of yacht broker and used to work for Catana, he knows two of the group members well – there are only 14 Catana 53s and we hear they are no longer making the model, so a relatively small group. Vincent came over for a drink later and had lots of valuable information about the islands for us. He currently has clients on board his boat, he runs it as a charter for a few months a year.