June 23 - 26, 2007 - Fatu Hiva

We've spent the past few days getting our house back in order after the Pacific Crossing. We've done copious amounts of laundry (I dance on it in the bathtub - like a Korean grandmother or Lucille Ball in the grape crushing episode of I Love Lucy). Drying the sheets has been a challenge in the kadiabatic winds that come gusting off the slopes around us. We culled our clothes pin population - the weak ones popping off the lines and sinking to the bottom of the bay, the stragglers getting chased down by Sten in the dinghy.

Sten has rebuilt the laptop twice. The highlight of the process was the retermination of the processor connections, one of which had broken in the initial reassembly attempt. After confirming that the keyboard was the only thing that was permanently damaged, he went back in and disconnected it. Then he found an on screen keyboard deep in the utility files, so now we're up and crawling again.
My dreams of fresh baguettes were not to be fulfilled here. The only baguettes come from Tahiti on the cargo ship that comes once every 3 weeks. So I went to bake some bread, only to discover that my supply of white flour was dangerously low. But the multigrain bread I produced was pretty good, once it was slathered in mounds of butter and drizzled with honey - we wouldn't want to be too healthy. Sten has spent a few evenings fishing from the dinghy. We're not sure what it is that we are eating, but it is really good. He and Lars, a singlehander who arrived on a boat half the size of ours ("Now that's doing something," as Sten put it when he pulled in), confirmed with the local fishermen that these fish don't have fish poisoning (some in this bay do). We've been gathering windfall limes and coconuts from the trees in the village. Mata'irea's new motto is "Fighting Scurvy, One Margarita at a Time."

Talking to the other cruisers around here, it seems that our 19 day passage was a bit of a record for the fleet coming across this month. Phoenix, which is a race boat, did it in 16 days, and we know of one other cruising boat that did it in 19. We're pretty pleased with ourselves and with Mata'irea.