After another week back in Papeete it was finally time to leave for good, just one hour before our departure though our good friends on Båten Anna arrived into the town quay from Tuamotus. It was great to see Aliv and Emili again but after a quick coffee aboard Whippersnapper it was time for us to join the start of the Tahiti to Moorea Saiing Rendezvous. Hopefully Båten Anna will catch up with us again shortly but probably not until Fiji now, we miss them.

The Tahiti to Moorea Sailing Rendezvous is a 3 day event including short rally from Papeete to Moorea. It's organised by a group called the Pacific Puddle Jump and acts as a welcome of all cruisersiers into the South Pacific region. The Puddle Jump is a rally across the Pacific, mainly for Americans departing La Paz in Mexico though open to anyone no matter your departure point. In a way it's like the ARC we did across the Atlantic but much more flexible. There's no official departure date but rather it's a way of getting in contact with other cruisers completing a similar voyage. In Papeete on the Friday night there was a welcome drinks with Tahitian dancing and a blessing of the skippers, to be honest it felt a little more like a hazing, we were stripped to the waist and made to dance Tahitian style in front of our laughing crews!

The next morning we all gathered outside of Papeete port for the start of the rally to Moorea, they call it a rally but it ended up being very competitive! We had a wonderful time because we had a very close race with two other yachts and it was the best sailing conditions we'd had in a long time. We just beat our two close rivals, Water Music and Cuttyhunk, and ended up 6th overall out of 27, not bad when you considering we were the first monohull under 50 feet to cross the line and there was no handicap.

Once in Moorea a number of Tahitian activities and sports were planed. We raced outrigger canoes in teams of 6 (2nd overall thank you very much), ran in a relay carrying bamboo poles weighted with hands of bananas and tried speed husking coconuts. Most of it was very silly but we enjoyed hanging out with our friends on other yachts and meeting new yachts we'll stay in contact with.

In other new's our new D1's are safely installed, our mainsail repaired and we finally have a replacement depth sounder! Thank you very much to Dad and Tina for organising a care package from Australia with a multitude of hard to find bits and pieces we needed.

A little note on our mainsail repair, we have an inmast furling main with vertical battens, the tear occurred when a batten got caught while furling in a squall. When speaking to the sailmaker he frankly said "I don't want to repair this, if you keep these vertical battens it's just going to happen again". His suggestion was to seal off the batten pockets and cut the roach out of the main so as to be a normal inmast furling mainsail. This was actually a solution we'd enquired about while in Croatia last year but were told it was a major alteration, well it turned out to be the same cost as repairing the tear so it was an easy decision for us. The vertical battens have been nothing but trouble and have no place on an ocean going yacht. The risk of jams and broken battens is high and we were always weary of getting the mainsail caught out in a squall and not being able to furl it away. Now after sailing with the new main in a variety of conditions we can say it's just brilliant, certainly no discernible loss of performance and it is so much easier to furl now. We keep saying to ourselves, if only we'd done this in Croatia.

As I write this we're enroute to Raiatea to meet up with the Graham's (my elder sister Tina and her family), they're chartering a cat and we're going to cruiser around Raiatea, Tahaa and Bora Bora together for a week, really looking forward to seeing these famous islands and spending time with family again.