As planned we left the anchorage around 6:30am and motored around the airport and tied up to the park wall in Pape’ete. Ben and I first went off in the dinghy to fill our empty propane tank and pick up some parts from the marine store including taking a dive tank to replace a lost screw which was rendering it unusable. We didn’t get all the parts on my list but we did get all the essentials which was good.
Next stop was to walk round to immigration. There we processed the paperwork to get Ben registered on the boat as well as officially clearing out of Polynesia ahead of time – saving us time and effort in Bora Bora. We had to visit the port captain before leaving but he was out until 11am leaving us to wander around Pape’ete to use up the time.
Eventually we went back to port captain. On the way we met a South African family. It turned out the brother of the mother lives in the same town in South Africa as my parents and sister do. It’s a small world.
As soon as we were back on the boat we slipped our lines and motored out of the port. The winds were light and variable at first so we used a varying amount of power from our batteries to supplement the push from the wind. About half way we caught the winds which were in the 28-34 knot range – a complete surprise. The winds were right from behind us forcing us to jibe our way to Cook Bay as well as forcing us to put a reef in the main. It was a bit of a fight at times as we were keeping the wind on an angle close to where we would lose the pressure on the head sail from time to time and hence losing the balance on the boat. We soon sailed right into the bay and with the slightly reduced winds and greatly reduced chop were able to head into wind and drop the sails.
We anchored close to where we anchored before and settled down for the rest of the day. For dinner we ate the pork ribs given to us by Valentino in Taou for our anniversary present. We watched a movie the end the day.
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