Wednesday August 15th, 2007<\/p>\n
We are still in Bora Bora. We had planned on leaving tomorrow,
\nhaving checked out of French Polynesia and gotten our bond back
\non Monday. When we went to the gendarmerie to check out we told
\nthe big buff gendarme that we would be leaving the next morning.
\nThey are so strict about checking out here that the gendarme
\nactually said that if we are leaving tomorrow we should come
\nback to do the checkout tomorrow, not today. We told him that we
\nwould be leaving at the crack of dawn so that would be
\nimpossible, and he relented, but not before asking three times
\nif we were “definitely” leaving tomorrow and then he insisted on
\nwriting “departure definite” on our papers. Of course we were
\nnot really planning on leaving the next day as there were too
\nmany things to take care of before we left and we had to wait
\nfor the right weather. Some poor guy tried to check out just
\nafter us and made the mistake of saying that he planned to leave
\non Wednesday. The gendarme refused to check him out and the man
\ngot fed up and said, “Ok, so check me out and I will leave
\ntoday”. That same man is currently anchored next to us (3 days
\nlater), and after talking to him today it is clear that he is
\nonly going to leave when the weather is ok – just like we are
\ndoing. We are actually having beautiful weather but the
\nforecast is for a disturbance to come up from the south in the
\nnext few days causing unsettled weather, strange wind direction
\n(north and northeast) and then a couple of days of no wind.
\nSince we have a 4 day sail ahead of us to get to Suvarov (in the
\nCook’s), we don’t want to take a chance with such strange
\nweather, so we are “roughing it” by hanging around this pretty
\nanchorage in Bora Bora for a few more days.<\/p>\n
We spent most of Saturday (August 11th) doing boat maintenance
\n(changing generator oil) and doing boat cleaning, but then had a
\nbeautiful snorkel by the reef here. We found a gorgeous coral
\ngarden just inside of the fringing reef with some spectacular
\ncoral, clams of all sizes and colors and lots of fish, including
\nvarieties we had never seen before. Saw some very bizarre and
\nvery big fish that were stuck inside a large fish trap. In the
\nevening we went over to Rishu Maru to visit and ended up staying
\nfor dinner and dancing on the deck together. We will miss Alex’s
\nmom Ericka (Ricky), and her sister Sol a lot. We just had so
\nmuch fun together these past two weeks.<\/p>\n
On Sunday morning (August 12) Mark and I moved the boat back to
\nthe Bora Bora yacht club so we could be closer to town and get
\ninternet access. We spent a lot of time trying to upload a
\nmovie of me swimming with the stingrays to our web site and
\ntaking care of bills and other business. I even got our taxes
\n(2006) submitted! In the evening we invited Vanessa and Morgan
\nfrom the Canadian boat “Mostly Harmless” and Oden and Wee from
\nthe Norwegian boat “Valkurie” over for sundowners.<\/p>\n
Monday we were still moored at the yacht club, but went to town
\nto check out, get our bond, get some groceries, etc. We also
\nchecked out the marine gas dock so that we would be prepared to
\nuse it to fill up our tanks the next day. It is always helpful
\nto get the lay of the land before approaching a new gas dock and
\nthis one was no exception. It is a very small dock, but looked
\neasy to approach. The woman who runs the place is exceedingly
\nunfriendly, but I guess as long as they sell us fuel we will be
\nok. In the evening Mark and I dinghied over to the dock at the
\nyacht club just to have a drink and watch the sunset. A man
\nwith two very cute sons came and sat beside us and he turned out
\nto be another yachtie from the British boat Clarabelle. They
\ninvited us to play a card game with them and it was a lot of
\nfun. The two young boys, Tom and John (they call him John-tee)
\nwere so adorable and had the most wonderful British accents. We
\nreally had a nice time with them.<\/p>\n
On Tuesday morning we wanted to go to the fuel dock and then
\nmove back to the anchorage by Motu Toopua. We had promised Rishu
\nMaru that they could have our mooring at the yacht club as they
\nare hard to come by and they had spent the last two nights
\nanchored by the motu. We called to let them know we were ready
\nto vacate the mooring and they motored over to us. Another boat
\nthat we know, Scholarship, was approaching the yacht club right
\nbeside Rishu Maru and saw us leaving. For a few minutes it
\nlooked like it was going to be a race between the two boats to
\nsee who could get to the mooring ball first, but we called out
\nto Scholarship to let them know we were saving it for our
\nfriends on Rishu Maru. Kind of like getting a parking spot in
\nManhattan I guess. Hopefully there will be no bad feelings on
\naccount of that episode.<\/p>\n
We motored over to the fuel dock and were glad to see that there
\nwere no other boats there. Just as we were pulling up to the
\ntiny dock, a small fishing boat raced in front of us and pulled
\nup at the dock, completely blocking our access to it and giving
\nus no time to stop our boat. We yelled frantically at him that
\nwe were coming in and that he had to move or we might
\naccidentally hit him, and he moved out of the way just in time.
\nFunny because this is a very low key kind of place but we had
\ntwo “parking space” episodes in the same morning. We filled all
\n8 of our 20 liter jerry cans with diesel, topped off our tank,
\nfilled up our gas tanks (for the dinghy) and went back to Motu
\nToopua to find a nice spot to drop anchor. There were a couple
\ndozen boats there, but we managed to find a great spot.<\/p>\n
It is Alex and Peter and Alex’s sister Sol’s birthdays this week
\nand we were invited to their boat for a birthday party last
\nnight. Two other groups of friends on boats that we have not
\nseen for a long time pulled in today and they were also there
\nfor the party — Yara and Nautilus. We had another fun evening
\nwith lots of food, wine, and then everyone danced on the deck
\nagain. Besides all of their other talents, Alex and Peter are
\nterrific dancers and it was fun to watch them dance together.<\/p>\n
It was a little scary getting back to our boat in the dark. Our
\nanchorage was about 1 1\/2 miles from the yacht club where Rishu
\nMaru was and it is amazing how long that distance can seem in
\nthe dark. Luckily there were lots of navigational lights in the
\nchannel and all went well. We will definitely avoid any more
\nlong dinghy rides at night though as I was quite uncomfortable
\nthe whole way. It is a distance that we would have covered in
\nabout 12 minutes in the daylight going “warp speed”with the
\ndinghy planing, but at night you have to go much slower so it
\ntook more than 1\/2 an hour.<\/p>\n
We had planned on spending today getting ready to leave for
\nSuvarrov, but after talking to Peter in the morning and checking
\nthe weather forecast ourselves, we decided it would be better to
\nhang out here for a few more days until the weather disturbance
\npasses.
\nL.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Wednesday August 15th, 2007 We are still in Bora Bora. We had planned on leaving tomorrow, having checked out of French Polynesia and gotten our bond back on Monday. When we went to the gendarmerie to check out we told the big buff gendarme that we would be leaving the next morning. They are so … <\/p>\n