Toiling and relaxing

The next few days were filled with various activities at the island of Tahiti and onboard Sea Turtle. Cruising life, you may think, is all fun. But there is also a lot of work in maintaining a boat, keeping up with all the necessary repairs, and just daily living jobs. No luxuries aboard Sea Turtle such as a washing machine, dishwasher, microwave, car in the garage, etc.

Boat jobs here included repairing the parted mainsail that blew out a while ago. It is getting old and frail but we want to make it last to New Zealand where sailmakers are readily available and very reasonable. Jordan used spare sail material for patching and spray glue instead of stitching. Doesn't look the best but will do the trick.

The other boat job involved re-plumbing a rather disjointed raw water intake line that had sprung an annoying slow leak. Jordan re-routed the original plumbing and simplified it eliminating 4 connections and hose clamps. The other overdue job was hand-washing all the salon and cockpit cushions to rid them of the accumulated salts for passages gone by.

We enjoyed Papeete's unique evening food fair experience where at 18:00, 15 to 20 mini kitchen vans pull up to the downtown waterfront, set up tables, chairs, and menu boards and offer their culinary selection that ranges from Chinese to pizza to crepes, etc. and with reasonable prices rarely found in French Polynesia. This happens every night of the week and is packed with patrons.

Vans everywhere behind bush

We went to the bountiful market where on its big day, Sunday starting at 04:00 (we slept in and arrived later at 05:00), and stocked up on all sorts of fresh fruits and vegetables. Long time since we have been up that early for produce! The market is spread over 7,000 square metres and includes craft booths and fragrant flower arrangements, one of which we bought for Sea Turtle.

Everyday municipal market

Bruce and Jeannie (SV Jabula) joined us one day for a rental car tour of the Island that left us a little disappointed, but we appreciated the Three Faarumai Waterfalls where it was only a 5-minute walk to the first one. If you look close, you can see Bruce and Jeannie in front of 1 of the 3 waterfalls.

Jordan and Judy with Jeannie and Bruce

We could have circumnavigated the island which consists of Tahiti Nui and Tahiti Iti in about 2 hours without making any stops.

The inner harbour here is never without at least a few mega yachts from all over the world bedecked with ultra expensive tenders and their own helicopter, in many cases. They are worth in the hundreds of millions of dollars and owned by untraceable corporations in tax free ports like Georgetown. Makes you wonder...

Arctic - 1 of many private yachts

Our last activity was taking advantage of the modern supermarket for provisioning where we got pretty much anything we wanted and at a reasonable price. It will be awhile before we see that again. It would also be awhile before we see our good friends Bruce and Jeannie again. We left them behind as they flew home for a few weeks.