After hearing back from Raiatea careenage – that there would be room for Sapphire and she could be liftedf out next week – I started looking again at my calendaer and working out what I should do and when, and on Wednesday booked a fligt back to NZ. It takes a mere 6 hours!  Somehow it ended up taking most of the day to do that!

The next day, Thursday I went ashore and hired a bike again and this time cycled across that bridge and right round Huahine Iti, It was a longer ride and a hotter day than my first cycle tour and I didn’t get back till 5pm.having had several stops to rest and read my book at various wonderfully scenic spots on the way round. I remember thinking – now would I rather do this or go to work?  

How terrible could it be to have to live here?

Speaking of books, the ones Ive been reading I picked up at the Laundry at Marina Taina. Its customary for cruisers to leave their finished- with books at such a place and help themselves  to any left by others – and out here lots of them are in French so any in English I tended to snatch up indiscriminately. Thus I read The Rain Maker by John Grisham and I enjoyed it. I also read Blow Fly one of those Forensics and autopsy riddled novels by Patricia Cornwell which are heavily promoted in Airport bookstores. It’s the first one of hers Ive read and I was disappointed – yes the technical descriptions of what happens to blood if its sprayed off a knife that’s being used to hack someone to bits are interesting,  but the story and the way it all fitted together, and in this book the way it all ends, is clumsy.  Great Expectations, which I read on Tubuai I think, was brilliant.



Anchor buddy and chain at 7 o.clock

So today, Friday I left Huahine and motor- sailed to Raiatea – well motored really as the hoped for breeze did not appear so it was a rather tedious 5 hour grind straight across and round to anchor near Raiatea Carenage (RC). The interesting part of the trip was getting the anchor up – at 7.30 the water was flat calm so I had a perfect view of what the anchors chain was doing so motored first forwards and to the right to pull it out from under a ledge and then where it had somehow lassoed a washing-machine-sized projection from a second rock at right angles to the first  decided to power forwards and pull the loop off the rock rather than try to untwist it – and this worked after a couple of goes at the wrong angle.  So off we went with an escort of dolphins – the first Ive seen in the entire trip!

I was hoping to talk to the guys at RC and find out something about what I needed to do to prepare the boat  but they didn’t seem interested on Friday afternoon! So I walked along the road, found a shop and bought a tin of Salmon for my dinner Back at the boat I had a swim to cool off and then got the razor out and got rid of my beard. It was getting to the point where it needed some sort of trimming and I couldn’t be bothered with that!