We finally left our mooring in Papeete off of Marina Taena after we completed our checkout and purchased duty free fuel and liquor. We were very surprised when we requested to stay an additional two days on our mooring and were quite ready to pay for it. They said "We're here for you and gave us two free days! This has not been our experience in French Polynesia so it was a nice change from the mercenary policies we grew to expect. We left with little wind and found ourselves beating at 2 to 3 knots. As we were about to give up and put the engine on the wind switched 180 degrees and started blowing 15 to 20 knots from the SSE. That put us on a screaming broad reach at 7 to 8 knots. As we pulled away from the shelter of the island the seas built and before we knew it we were in 6 foot swells as well. We only were planning to go about a hundred miles to Raiatea which would be overnight and arrival just after dawn. As we were sailing overnight I decided to reef down and as we were reefing the main a funny phenomenon occurred. The end of the boom was in the WATER. We had no warning noise of any failure but obviously our hard vang was no longer doing it's job. Apparently our vang gooseneck fitting lost it's nut and the bolt backed out over torqueing the hinge. Since we were already reefing we furled in our main and sailed with gennoa alone. We were headed for a location where the Moorings has a yacht charter base so there would be ample services available to repair our vang as well as our SSB Ham radio which had stopped transmitting.

We had a rolly slow sail overnight and when we reached Raiatea the wind was accelerating down the mountain slope gusting to about 35 knots. We finally got ourselves anchored and found a protected spot but the wind blew us around so much that it wasn't pleasant.

We did make contact with a Canadian local resident who very adroitly troubleshot the radio and repaired it. He also took the vang to a welder friend of his who the same day repaired it so we were very pleased with the service we received. We had friends that stayed in the marina with the unchartered Moorings boats and drove around the island touring it's periphery.

Several days ago we left early in the am and sailed 30 miles to Bora Bora completing a twenty-year quest. Bora Bora has a reputation of being spectacular and very exclusive. Our first views were special. We had to sail a few hundred yards off the southeastern reef on a beam reach at 8 knots with flat sees. The mountain was prominent in the middle of the atoll and the lagoon extended 360 degrees around the central mountain The sun was bright and the water in the lagoon was a beautiful turquoise highlighted by the deep blue lagoon.

The hotels are Very high end. We visited the Hilton and security nearly ran us off until we asked if we could go to the bar. We walked the facilities and got some beautiful pictures of the Tiki huts that they rent starting at 650 dollars per night. Since we weren't welcome to walk the beach and since they wouldn't sell us internet access we left the next day to motor a half hour to the town marina and anchorage. It was blustery and the anchorage was about 80 feet deep. So we motored over to the Bora Bora Yacht Club occupying a beautiful new facilities. We took a mooring and to our surprise when we backed down hard on it we dragged it about 50 yards! Years ago I read to do that and over the years I done it many times but never had one drag. We picked up the adjacent mooring and it was secure despite full throttle in reverse.

After a few days and after some light provisioning we motored our way to the eastern atoll and it was the most beautiful location we've been in. The water was drop dead clean and turquoise. We had to gunkhole through shallow water at times to a narrow channel. After about an hour and a half we arrived at a white sand beach with 10 feet of green water over a sand bed with few coral heads. We felt like we had at last started cruising! We believe the back end of this trip through Tonga and Fiji will be more like this with secluded spectacular views and clean water filled with fish. However after we leave here the water will get colder as we head south from Samoa so it may not be as inviting. We'll see. We do have pictures but no Internet again so we'll not be able to post them until we get to American Samoa in about 2 weeks.

Now we're getting ready for a thousand mile passage west to Samoa.

From the Crew of Always Saturday