Blog 19 Aug. 2022

16 48.76S:150 59.43W

Avea Bay 3

Wednesday, today, has been a bit miserable, I'm sorry to say. With a break in the rain, we departed the boat this morning in time to deliver our dirty laundry to the hotel staff. While ashore in the motel lobby, Conni attempted, vainly, to get some on-line payments in the bank queue, but the slow Internet here stymied that effort. I talked to some Americans for a while during her banking attempt, but they were a bit full of themselves. One of them simply would not speak to me at all. Perhaps I should have bathed... On return to Wings, we had our breakfast, read a bit, then started on the water maker task.

The task was to replace the old reverse osmosis membrane with a new one, then trying the entire unit. I had been able, through an hour's effort, to watch a 12-minute YouTube video produced by the manufacturer, so had a clear idea and good notes on what I needed to do. Alas, the process that had been outlined was simply too difficult and after an hour spent banging on this metal tube's ends, we reassembled the device and the aft cabin and decided to await some better Internet and ask the manufacturer what we should do next. The metal plugs that contain the 950psi pressure needed to force salt water through a membrane that's only large enough for water molecules were cemented in place and would not yield to hammer blows.

It rained all Wednesday, the third night and second day of constant rain and wind. It prevented a lot of what we'd do while at anchor: no snorkeling, no deck work, and no Internet for news and weather. Conni's frustrated and a bit angry about the conditions, although she freely admits that the conditions are safe and there're few places that would be better for us to be.

With refrigeration gone, we had to discard some food today: a bit of lunch meat and all of our mayonnaise, as well as some fine French sausage and cheese that we use for cocktail hour, so we had Oreos and chips for lunch. Tomorrow, we'll rent our car and will buy enough ice for the next few days, as well as a minimum of groceries that require refrigeration. Until I get a new system installed, it'll be ice as often as we can acquire it.

The only bright spot was that I did finally get our SSB radio to work properly. It was a software issue but I finally figured out what to do and inadvertently sent a duplicate of a previous blog to be posted. Oops! Still, we can get weather and send email, now, so a big deal.

Thursday, 19 Aug We awakened early and got to the resort dock. It's been underwater for the past two days because of high tides and the enormous volume of water coming over the surrounding reef from the enormous storm-generated surf. There's so much that the beach has been inundated by several feet: it's hard to imagine.

We fetched our laundry, acquired our vehicle, then set off to Fare for ice, Internet, and some groceries. It's only a 20-minute drive, so we arrived quickly. On most of our trips, Conni drives and I navigate since some rental agencies require more money if someone over 70 is at the wheel. We arrived in Fare and set about getting some Internet via Conni's iPhone. Too slow! I was able to get some email, but Conni's needed web connection simply timed out repeatedly. Resigned and frustrated, we tromped over the the market. We got a huge back of ice, lots of canned food, and some peanut butter (hey, no refrigeration needed!), we returned to the car and back to the boat. We carried ice and groceries back to the boat where Conni loaded a borrowed soft cooler that we've packed in our now-defunct fridge. With that done, we motored back to the wet dock and to our vehicle for the start of our island tour.

Great tour! Like our home island of Raiatea, this island has a lot of maraes, or ceremonial centers. We were able to check on various anchoring possibilities and get a general feel for the island. There's considerably less tourist infrastructure on Huahine, as we had known, so the island is much more traditional than, say, Bora Bora. We saw something here that we've not seen anywhere else: fish traps. These are large (100-yards) V-shaped piles of rock in several narrow inlets. The wide end is open to the ocean-side of the inlet and fish traveling up the inlet from the sea will invariably be herded into the small end of the trap where they are processed for food. The size of the trap implies a certain amount of community effort, and presumably communal resource sharing. It's a clever idea. I cannot tell if they're still used. When I can, I'll post some photos.

Huahine is actually two islands split in two at Bourayne Bay and spanned by a short bridge. We went south from our resort so that we could see the East side of Huahine Iti (the smaller, southern island: "iti" means "small"), then across the bridge spanning the split in islands, then up the same, Eastern side of Huahine Nui (the larger, northern island: "Nui" means "large"). We circled the northern end, then back to Fare, since there's only one road on the island, one always circles back to any one place. This time, we chose a lunch spot in another part of the Fare docks and fortunately, Conni was able to use my laptop and Google Chrome to finally get our banking completed. Hurray! Over burgers and fries, we completed the financial tasks and slowly ambled to the resort, arriving only 30-minutes early. Conni hypothesized that perhaps this location's cell was less busy, and we've found that Chrome is a bit faster out here than Safari. Who knows?

On Wednesday afternoon, we had been invited for a Thursday wine meeting with cruisers on "WildStar", a Tartan 52-foot, cutter-rigged ketch (two masts, two foresails). She's a very nice boat and beautifully maintained. Bob and Bonnie struck us a nice couple, but learned this afternoon that she's an ex-attorney who's traded her briefcase for a duffle, earned her 100-Ton master's license with sailing endorsement, and was hired by Bob as crew/mate. He's an electrical engineer who once worked for the government in all sorts of classified work. They're both terribly interesting people. We returned the invitation and they came aboard Wings for wine before their on-shore dinner plans. I'm sure that it was slumming for them on our much smaller and older boat, but we all enjoyed the evening and conversation. Bonnie has just dropped by (today, Friday) and invited us to dinner at the resort, so we'll have one last meeting with these two interesting people.

We plan on departing tomorrow, Saturday, and returning to Fare by boat. We'll stay there a day and return to Raiatea on Sunday, since the weather forecast is for milder conditions. We've put out requests for info on the refrigeration guy who's supposed to be in Uturoa, and hope to have him give us a working fridge (even temporarily) or a death certificate. In either case, we'll know and can make plans.

We've enjoyed, well, mostly, our time here in Avea. The weather has been miserable for much of the time but one has to be somewhere and this has been safe and fairly protected.