8/10 We did depart Apu as we promised, but decided to move to another island. It's our first trip out of our home lagoon. We were rightfully anxious for everything to work: engine, sails, and new electronics. After the usual engine check and deck prep, we tried to start the engine and it wouldn't start! Damn! I quickly grabbed our Honda generator and hauled it on deck, plugged it into ship power, and started it. That extra juice did the trick and we were under way.

We fiddled with the autopilot all the way over and only in the final few miles did we determine how to set it on a waypoint course. B&G makes superb instruments but their manuals are deficient, I'm sorry to say. A simple statement someplace saying, "To have your autopilot steer you to a location of your choosing, press these buttons in this sequence." or some such. The manual was silent on the process.

Nevertheless, the autopilot performed perfectly, the fault being in the sailors' knowledge and not the electronics. There was no wind, so we motored the entire 24 nautical miles from Taha'a to Huahine, entering at the pass at Fare, the main village.

If you've owned or observed a dog bedding down by circling around and around the bedding pile, you will know exactly what we were doing in the Fare bay. Finally finding a suitable location, Conni dropped the hook in 35-feet of water and I backed down to spread chain and set the anchor firmly in the bottom. I watched the bow go down as I pulled the catenary out of the chain! Good set, first attempt!

We had the dinghy mostly inflated and on deck, so it was fairly fast to lift her over the lifelines and splash her. We drifted her back and aligned her stern with the outboard mount and I boarded the dinghy. Conni releases the dinghy motor from the rail mount and somehow lowers the motor to me while I'm standing in the dinghy stern. I lift it over the transom and tighten it. The outboard is 45 pounds so how Conni can handle it so easily has always mystified me. At any rate, Conni continued on preparing the boat for our departure and I continued preparing the dinghy with fuel, paddles, and such. For the second time in Fare, the outboard started on the first crank and we motored to Fare for rosé, toilet paper, baguettes, and ice.

Ice. Yeah, that morning in Apu, I awakened and checked the state of charge on the batteries, something that each of us does many times daily. After a night of running the fridge, we're normally down by 40-50 AmpHours, but we were down about half that. Damn! The fridge was off and we couldn't get it to start. I had done what I could, but a 38-year-old fridge has no parts to repair. It's never failed so we treat it gently and hope it works. Neither of us was willing to categorically say that our old Cold Machine was dead but we had no fridge. Thus, we needed ice.

Fortunately, the local market had everything and we soon headed back to the boat for another round of obvious attempts to fix the fridge: fuses, loose wires, bad connections, all was checked. No joy.

To console ourselves, we each had a big, greasy cheeseburger and fries at the Huahine Yacht Club, washing it all down with a couple of MaiTais. Never underestimate the ability of alcohol and grease to fill the hole of refrigeration loss!

Since it was my 73rd birthday and the fridge had stopped working, Conni prepared a thawed steak that we had bought in Uturoa. We had an outstanding meal aboard, with the aforementioned rosé for dinner and a Wings Sundowner cocktail. Hey, rosé and steak...that's a thing, right?

8/11 Next morning, we completed our preparation chores and the engine started quickly. With all the electronics blazing away, we motored through the mooring field and motored toward D'Avea Bay, one of our favorites.

The route to Avea is the most hazardous and challenging that we normally try. There are very good charts, and we have superb electronics, but the route is still challenging with many convoluted and narrow routes through hazardous channels lined with reefs. Get lost or confuse there and your boat will be on a reef in seconds.

It's a 2-1/2 hour trip and when we finally arrived, we were relieved to be there. We had removed the dinghy motor and gear but had dragged the dinghy behind the boat since the trip from Fare was all inside the reef. We found a mooring close to the Relais Mahana Lodge. Squalls kept roaring past so we didn't continue preparing for a visit to Relais Mahana, but did enjoy a spectacular evening in the cockpit. The clouds boiled past a full moon and the mooring field, huge but empty, was a set of tiny lights and tiny people moving in the breeze. When we bought the boat, there was a nice but small, teak table that attached to the binnacle. We rarely use it but in this last round of electronics installs, I made sure that there was room to mount it, and we've enjoyed using it again. We had our cocktail table up and used it for our cocktail hour as well as dinner. Conni is on a hard-core French rosé kick so we've been having rosé a lot. Nice wine for the South Pacific.

We had hot showers! After running for a few hours, we have enough engine heat to allow us several nights of hot water for showers using the system that Conni designed. I will post a photo of it when we get some Internet. Regardless, it's a refreshing and glorious feeling to climb in bed de-stickied from the day's sweat and toil.

We'll complete our dinghy prep and motor to Relais Mahana Lodge. Elections in Alaska will be in progress soon and we have applied for vote-by-fax. We've got to download, sign, and fax our ballots back to Alaska and hope that we can persuade the Relais Mahana staff to print and fax our ballots. We're willing to pay, of course. We're also planning on dinner at the lodge tonight, so we have a full schedule of activities in store. We think that a week here might be just right.