GHOST

Tomorrow we leave Tahiti and French Polynesia..finally! When we arrived we knew we might be here for a while fixing the rig but perhaps not quite this long. However this cloud definitely had a silver lining as it saw us spend some great times with new friends, drink far too much and generally just hang out in one of the most beautiful parts of the world. We sailed in the Tahiti to Mo'orea regatta on Delos as Brian, Erin and Brady opened their home to us when it was too windy to take GHOST out with a damaged rig! We partied hard with cruisers and big boat crews alike on the pontoons of Marina Tania, we scuba dived, took scooters where scooters where not made to go, watched an eclipse, got drunk on Bloody Marys at Bloody Mary's and conquered one of the highest peaks on Bora Bora. When the time came to leave Bora Bora and head back east while everyone else carried on west we not only left behind great new friends, we lost Jay to the lure of festivals, single ladies and a road trip in the US. But we took with us great memories and a determination to catch up with everyone up again!

So after a quite motor back in calm windless conditions to Tahiti it felt like we were the only people left out here. To our surprise we found Andrew on Fandango (we first met Andrew back in Gib in 2008) was in the marina so a happy hour beer and catch-up was in order. Ross and Jo on Sojourn arrived after a weather delay which meant our paths crossed again, so we had plenty to catch-up on over beers, wine and a couple of BBQ's. Keith and Flora off of Silandra V soon arrived back as did Ayla and Toby on Lady K and before we knew it we were back in the swing of things as regulars at the dinghy bar for 2for1 happy hour.

On a more serious note the mast was lifted out of the boat on the 26th and in doing so we discovered a small crack in one of the first spreaders, and while we could have put it back on and been fine, considering the mast was already down we figured we might as well change both first spreaders as well even though it would delay us a further week. Good news was the new spreaders arrived in speedy fashion and soon we were talking about dates when we could re-step the mast. So up it went again on Friday the 26th, followed by a day and a half of hard yakka to get the boom, vang and all lines back in place, sails attached, reefs rethreaded, bimini back up and finally this afternoon, after 3500 plus nauticals we had a quick test sail with full main and headsail up!! I tell you what, it has been a very very long time coming.

So now it's just the two of us. We'll sail past the Cook Islands without stopping with a view to maybe stopping at Niue but more likely heading straight on to Tonga to make up some time and focus on some key island groups. Tonga holds our interest and we want to spend some time there before scooting on through Fiji for a quick dive with feeding sharks before making it to Vanuatu to meet some mates on the 19th September.

http://svdelos.blogspot.com/2010/07/au-revoir-french-polynesia-by-erin.html