We just finished a quick over-nighter from Moorea to Huahini. Unfortunately, both of us were queasy the entire trip, so we are a bit beat now and it isn't clear if we're going to rally to visit some of the sights on this island.

Moorea was quite fun. The 2 bays on the north coast that wrap most of the way around Mt Rotui are quite beautiful. The first day, we dinghied off the boat with our bikes and rode to Belvedere Pt which is a good overlook of the bays. The ride turned out to be a bit of a workout as we had a good deal of climbing and some dirt roads. The worst part was we hadn't brought our map with us so we didn't know how much further it was going to be. We did ultimately find our way after a good hour or so of hard riding.

Part of the reason for going to Belvedere Pt was that Dana had seen there was a letterbox there and we wanted to try to find our first one (our previous attempt on Rangiroa being unsuccessful). However, this letterbox was placed by the same person who did Rangiroa and turned out to be a dud as well. We hunted around in the trees for about a 1/2 hour trying to make sense of them, but they were clearly off in at least one of the instructions, so we had to try variations of most of the steps. Disappointing.

We road down the to the other bay and and then around Mt Rotui back to Cook Bay, stopping for lunch at a Hilton Resort along the way. We were a bit startled by the prices as the $15 for the burger we split did not include the $5 fries. Quite extravagant.

We finally got back to the boat and both of us collapsed from exhaustion. We both napped for several hours and didn't have the energy to get up and make a proper dinner.

The next day we went on a mammoth dinghy ride, probably 10 miles or so, to an area where stingrays and sharks like to hang out. There was a mooring there and we dove in for a bit to see all the fish. Our guess is the fish conglomerate there because tour boats regularly come through and feed them. Still, it was a neat experience. The dinghy ride back was particularly difficult as the winds had picked up and were going against us, causing some choppy waves to beat us up.

Exhausted as we were, we managed to stow the dinghy of deck, put the outboard way, and get the Northfork ready to head out to Huahini. On our way out, we stopped at a small fuel dock to load up on diesel. That was the first time we had taken on diesel since Galapagos, almost exactly 2 months. As it was, we still had over 1/2 tank of fuel (75 of 150 gallon tank). Granted we had emptied 30 gallons of jerry cans into the tank several weeks before and in Papeete we had not used our generator except for some appliances (washing machine, dishwasher) that were incompatible with the shore power hertz at the dock, but still it is good to know we can make it so far on our own.