Remember the Galapagos, where our blogs were filled with stories of sealions, iguanas, penguins and boobies? Here in Tahiti there is very much less in the way of exciting wildlife, but we do have a few little friends to entertain us.

G’s favourite is the yellow puffer fish that cruises the marina, chewing on the weed that festoons our hanging anode and encrusts the bottom of the hull. He’s a fat little thing, about 18 inches long, with a rather shocked expression. There’s food enough here for 100 more of his friends but as far as we know he works alone.

We keep our bananas in a net hanging from the stern arch, which looks very tropical-salty-seadog, but has a drawback: they are a magnet for red-vented bulbuls, which adore them. These are – to K’s mind – enchantingly funny little birds, with their cheeky, scruffy quiffs and their splash of blazing red on their - er - vents. Unlike the puffer fish, these hunt in pairs; as soon as one of them finds food (eg, our bananas) it screeches loudly at its partner, who arrives for a long, heated debate about who gets to go first at burrowing into the ripest fruit. K now protects the bananas better, but usually leaves any damaged ones out, just for the entertainment.

We may have already mentioned the ray that lives in the marina. He hides under the pontoons during the day, but at night, when the under-pontoon lights come on, he comes out and wafts a circuit from one light to the next, doing a long slow loop round and round.

And so to cockroaches: not friends, but certainly a common topic of conversation here in town. A friend has been making lovely little roach motels out of loo-roll tubes, smeared with a paste of sugar and boric acid, and prettily decorated (just because). She says they work.