Well we are back and finally getting off the dock! Exit Strategy has been tied up for 41 days and she is getting restless (read "we are getting restless").
We've been back in Tahiti for 10 days after a great trip home to visit family and friends. Although hectic we managed a road trip to Alberta, a night of Wednesday night racing at the Yacht Club and more dinners with friends than we can count. Tom was even able to fit in a week of work.
Most of our time since returning has been spent doing a variety of boat projects including adding an extra strut to the hydrovane, getting the engine on the diving compressor running, climbing the mast to investigate the VHF radio antenna (the problem ended up being solved by installing a second antenna on the radar pole), replacing the pump on the forward head and a number of smaller projects. Whew! Time for some R&R!
We took time out to do a bit of sightseeing, and rent a car for a few days to tour the island with our friends on Red (Fran and Richard) and Huck (Heidi, Joe and Richard). We managed to circumnavigate Tahiti in one (long) day. Along the way stopped to see Venus point where both Cpt. Cook and Bligh have landed in the past, and where Cook observed Venus eclipsing the sun. He was attempting (unsuccessfully) to calculate the distance from the earth to the sun. We also hiked up to three waterfalls and stopped at a blow hole to watch the spray fly into the sky. To top off the tour we stopped at a small restaurant and all had streak frites (steak and fries) as that was all they had on the menu!
We've made a number of trips to the city of Papeete both to buy boat parts and supplies as well as to go to the Roulette (a series of food wagons that set up in a downtown parking lot for the evening) The food was excellent and the setting was, shall we say "unique"? We are fortunate to have a large supermarket a short walk away from the marina so food provisioning has not been the challenge it had been for the past few months. The girls spent a day shopping and black pearl hunting in numerous boutiques.
Later today we are going to ease back into cruising gently by picking up a mooring buoy inside the reef, where we'll spend a couple of nights before moving on to Moorea. We really hope to get back into the water tomorrow and say hello to our aquatic friends!
(we've uploaded a few more photos in the gallery)