From Tuamotus

7/7 Saturday
We're planning to leave Rangiroa tomorrow, so bye bye internet- thought I'd write a quick update. Thankfully, we both feel pretty much back to normal after whatever GI illness that got us. Since I shocked the water tanks with bleach, we feel like we're living in a pool now since every time we use the water we smell chlorine. Oh well, maybe it'll whiten us up, we're pretty tan these days.

I think we've done all we can do here given the weather forecast, so plan to try to make for one more atoll named Tikehau tomorrow and if we can't get in the tricky entrance, we'll continue on to Tahiti. If we get in there and the forecast stays as it is, we'll stay a day to dive. If the 25kt winds that are forecast for Thurs get moved up, we'll have to leave the following day for Tahiti since we'd like to have a nice passage over there. It is so complicated timing the passes, with so many variables that can make the predicted times incorrect. Further, you've got to get out of one place, travel to the next one and get in there on a favorable tide too. Of course this doesn't always happen, and we've talked to two other boats now that have had a rough time getting in. In the Society islands, this won't matter so much. We had so wanted to tour around to different anchorages within this atoll including a blue lagoon. But the wind hasn't been right to go since it is a wide open anchorage- you need a calm night. Well, wouldn't you know tonight is DEAD CALM, even though it wasn't forecast to be so.

We rented bikes one day to tour the main motu at Rangiroa, and we biked down to the other pass called Avatoru. It seems like it would be calmer than Tiputa pass, near where we're anchored, and we think we may leave that way tomorrow. We also snorkeled at the Aquarium again and this time I brought some bread. I made a few hundred friends and Jon got a little video of them. I had to hold the bread bag out of the water to keep from being attacked by tropical fish. Yesterday we did a scuba dive on the outside reef with the dive shop in hopes of seeing the dolphin. We saw some, but that was about it- they never came close. It was neat to hear them clicking and to see them in the distance but it wasn't an "encounter" in any way. The reef was just OK. We did see a very nice school of barracuda & a really tame turtle who met me nose to nose and then it went right over to Jon's lap. When we learned to dive in Bequia, Grenadines and did much more diving in Bonaire, the Turks and much of the NW Caribbean, we were so taken aback by how jam packed the reef was- a wall was so dense that there was no place to put your hand to hold on- everything was alive. There were soft & hard corals, whips and black corals that looked crazy against the blue. It isn't quite as dense here, hard to explain. There are more fish though. Fakarava was incredible and in our opinion, it has this atoll beat hands down. Anyway, the dive was OK but we didn't feel a need to spend money on another one. In the afternoon, we dinghied over to the other island on the opposite side of the pass to go for a walk on the windward side and to get some diesel. There is a long, quiet road that runs for miles right along the shore and we had a great afternoon walk & then strolled back along the beach. On the way over, with no masks in the dinghy, we saw a pod of dolphin right in our path so we stopped to watch them. They came hustling over to see us in the clear blue water making all sorts of noise. It would have been better to be in the water with them.
So today, we waited for slack tide in the pass, went over to where the dolphin were yesterday and indeed they were there! Quickly donned our snorkeling gear, got in, and they left! Never saw them once we got in the water. Arahh! We drifted all over the pass from the open blue, down both sides, in the middle- never saw 'em again. So we came back to the boat and scrubbed the hull. At least we see lots of shark suckers (they're like a remora) since there's about 10 of them that hang out under the hull. After trying to "save" the bottom paint and not scrub it very much, we figured out that the growth was just piling on and the bottom paint wasn't doing anything. So we've been picking at the hull doing a super duper scrub and it looks so much better. I've got the waterline spotless and we have most of the hull looking respectable although it needs attention every few days to stay on top of it.

I finally took the initiative to learn how to make yogurt, in part because what you can get here is ridiculously expensive and also because I had already bought the starter. So I made my first batch a couple of days ago, liked the results and made another one today using 2 T from the initial batch as the starter for this one. It worked great & I'm really happy to have it. I haven't been able to get any rolled oats here at all whatsoever so we've been out of granola, cereal is $10/box and eggs are $5.50/doz & hard to find so you start wondering what to have for breakfast. Jon made bread today and well.... It looked promising but this time, it was over the rim of the pan when he put it in the oven and then promptly fell down to about the same height we usually get which is like the half the size! It's really pathetic! At least we have yogurt.

A friend told us today that as of about 2 weeks ago, French Polynesia loosened the 90 day limit for Americans so that now we can stay longer and it is still free to be here (I mean free as of customs/immigration). I won't believe it until we get to Tahiti and check in ourselves but this would take the pressure off. It was also nice not to have to rush to Tahiti within 30 days of arriving in Fr Poly which is what all the cruising guides had said. Everything changes all the time, that's for sure. But we did decide on an itinerary, subject to change of course. For the moment, it is to do the Society islands, then head to an atoll in the Cook Islands called Suwarrow which is a national park, then go to American Samoa & maybe Samoa (formerly called Western Samoa), then down to Tonga. Raratonga harbor is currently closed so we decided not to go there and we've heard too many mixed reviews on Nuie from people we trust so given our relatively dwindling time, we think this will be good. American Samoa has domestic USPS service so we're already fixing to order in a bunch of stuff. The latest breakage is 2 dive regulators- one broke and then the never been used spare that has just been sitting on the boat for 5 years just busted. So much for spares.

Well that's all I've got.