Sailing – Page 5 – Coast Guard Couple

May 23, 2011

Further experiments in tourism

Moorea, Society Islands, French Polynesia

(cont’d from previous post)

Continuing our exploration of the heritage site we found the ruins of a marae (altar/temple) and evidence that perhaps Mr. Morse was a bit premature in taking credit for his code…also perhaps Greg is better at “tourist-ing” than he first let on…

Our final stop on the tour was a series of scenic viewpoints in the mountains. The roads were very, very steep. While this was something we had previously experienced, the truck added a new twist. Namely, the road was too narrow to allow us to turn around at the top. So the driver had to decide: was he going backwards on the way up or the way down? Continue reading “Further experiments in tourism”

May 2, 2011

Mind the Jetwash

Papeete, Tahiti, Society Islands, French Polynesia

We have established that Papeete is a city of contrasts. A land where, quite literally, dogs and cats are living together.

One of the most striking personifications of this is the harbor.

Now on our journey through the islands of French Polynesia so far we have navigated everything from rock minefields that will spear your hull like a ripe mango to rip currents that turn your boat into a bumper bowling ball with coral reefs and desert islands playing the part of the bumpers. So we had a pretty solid feeling that, with enough preparation, we could handle just about anything this island could throw at us.

Which is of course why, in Tahiti, it’s not the island that will sink your boat. That would be too easy. The reef limits how big the protected shipping channel is but what room they have is clear from natural obstructions. See, Tahiti is a developed port. In fact it’s the only developed port in this entire county. Which means that everything, and we do mean everything, not to mention just about every one, that goes anywhere in French Polynesia comes through Papeete first. And while this town is ridiculously huge by island standards, London-sized it ain’t. Lots of people, lots of stuff, all trying to get somewhere at the same time in a small city. So while the environment has been beaten back for your navigational well-being, it’s everything else sharing your space in this very confined, busy harbor that makes life interesting. Let us elaborate: Continue reading “Mind the Jetwash”

April 11, 2011

The Little Boat That DID!

Papeete, Tahiti, Society Islands, French Polynesia

Tahiti is also the place where we part ways with FLY AWEIGH. A few months and about 5000 nautical miles ago, two friends asked us to come with them on an amazing adventure. To do what many dream about but few actually accomplish: to sail a 44 foot sailboat from Mexico to Tahiti. Along the way we’ve faced thousands of miles of open ocean and become shellbacks, combated air pirates, opened coconuts with dull machetes, swam with 250 sharks and had a dozen other adventures. What was promised was the trip of a lifetime. It did not fail to meet that lofty mark.

Now we are here, in a place we talked about as if it would take an eternity to get to and really it only took a couple of months. Our time together has come to an end. Since we already have our next boat out of Tahiti lined up in a few weeks and Tiffany’s mom is coming out by plane (wuss 😉 we will become “normal tourists” for a time. It should be interesting. Don’t worry, we’ll keep the blog going with our adventures in Tahiti & Bora Bora just like we did in La Cruz de Huanacaxtle. Allan & Alison will continue on their cruise and we will very likely see them again on this trip. From now on though, it will be as friends passing in a port.

“Shipmate” is a term that people throw around a lot without understanding what it means. Most seagoing military types understand what it means to serve on a ship with another person: when it comes right down to it, it’s just you and your crew against Continue reading “The Little Boat That DID!”

April 7, 2011

We’ve Reached Civilization Indeed!

Papeete, Tahiti, Society Islands, French Polynesia

Located in the Society Island chain, Tahiti is the best known and main island of French Polynesia. With a massive population of 131,695, Papeete is the capital of both the island and the colony. Scoffing at that number? In case you haven’t been keeping track, about 49% of the entirety of the population of French Polynesia lives in this city. Not this island, this city. The next largest town we’ve encountered consisted of about 1700 people. The only university in French Polynesia is here along with actual shopping malls, supermarkets, (…finally!) restaurants that don’t double as family rooms and all the modern conveniences. Welcome to the big city.

Papeete is most assuredly Continue reading “We’ve Reached Civilization Indeed!”

April 4, 2011

The First Place You Can Actually Name!

Tahiti, Society Islands, French Polynesia

Holy cow we actually sailed to Tahiti!

Tahiti is 4,067 miles from San Diego and that’s as the crow flies. Well, actually at that point it would probably be an albatross but we digress. Continue reading “The First Place You Can Actually Name!”

March 31, 2011

When white people mangle Polynesian traditions

Buy Sharktopus on Amazon!

Why do you want me to own Sharktopus?

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At sea, enroute Tahiti, French Polynesia

Getting an actual French Polynesian tattoo created by a real, genuine French Polynesian on an honest to goodness island in the middle of the ocean is MAJOR nerd cred in the sailing community. No mere skull and crossbones at the local ink shop here people! Take the source of hundreds of years of sailor tradition and possibly thousands of years of Polynesian culture, put it at the immediate end of the longest single sailing transit you will likely ever do in your entire life and tie it up all in one piece of very well done personalized custom art that can be tastefully placed wherever you want on your body! Though they are even more conservative than even the modern tattoos for the locals, cruiser tattoos manage to be really nice while maintaining some of their original elements.

Not to mention the bragging rights! Holy cow for the rest of your natural life people will point and ask you questions about your tattoo which is the perfect segway into you telling the crowd-enthralling tales of nautical daring-do that you had to go though in order to get that inkjob!

The result is that everyone was getting tattoos. The people you would least expect, the people who swore they wouldn’t, were coming to the cruiser diners sporting their newly minted badges. The number kept growing and, though people didn’t push, there was a taste of peer pressure in the air mixed with the hint of a limited time only offer. “We’re pulling out tomorrow and what are the odds we’ll make it out here again? Last chance!”

So, the big question, did we get tattooed?

It was very tempting and no, no we did not.

Ok, well it was very tempting for Greg. There was no way Tiffany was going to pay actual money to have someone “stab me with a needle a few thousand times!” Also, it’s a permanent mark on her skin and if she commemorated everything notable she did with permanent ink, well, she’d probably look like that guy from the last post!

For Greg, well, gosh. Remembering this trip is what this whole blogging project is for. He didn’t have an intention to get a tattoo when he left Mexico and he hasn’t really gotten any new reasons since arriving on the islands. A tattoo is something that is difficult, if not impossible to get rid of and he thinks anyone making an irrevocable decision should have darn good and specific reasons to do it. He figures he can always get a tattoo later but would have a much harder time “un-getting” one. Sides, he learned to play the ukulele and improved his French, which in his humble opinion, is both way more useful and much cooler.

… and since when did Greg need a good excuse to start telling a story?

Still, a turtle would have been pretty sweet, since we crossed the equator and all.

What would you have done?

March 24, 2011

Traveler or Tourist?

And the winners of their own special copies of Sharktopus on DVD are…

Mike Berndt with this comment

and

Michael Lockridge with this comment!

Congratulations guys, we’ll be shipping it out to you shortly and awaiting your reviews 😉

You can still buy Sharktopus on Amazon!

What’s with the obsession with Sharktopi? Guess who’s in it!

——————————–

Tikehau, Tuamotu, French Polynesia

We prepare to leave this little island paradise and head for the Society Islands with a little hesitation. Not only is Papeete, Tahiti the capital and ONLY major city in this “colony” the size of Europe and consisting of a conglomeration of over 100 islands it is also a known location. Translation: Tourist town and more importantly, normal tourists. Unlike us. We’re different.

No, seriously, we are. The nature of cruising on a sailboat makes us a significantly different “type” of tourist than the typical one. For example, we live on our boat so we don’t worry about living in a hotel. Which means we don’t have to make every day worth the daily hotel rate. It actually relieves a great deal of stress from the traveling equation. Instead of telling you about tourist attractions for gringos in Mexico, I can actually tell you what it means to really live in La Cruz de Huanacaxtle for over a month. I can tell you about a city that when we arrived there, most of the tourists were actually other Mexicans!

We don’t have a flight home to catch and that alleviates the rush of most travelers. Met a new friend and want to stay an extra few days to have them over for dinner? Heck, why not? We even have a “home” to invite them to! Fall in love with a place and don’t want to leave yet? Sure, we can tack on a few days. The main concern we have is the expiration of our tourist visas.

Also, since leaving Mexico we have pretty much been in places where the locals outnumber the tourists. If you have never been a tourist in a non-tourism location let us tell you, it makes a HUGE difference in the way people treat you and your overall experience. We actually got to meet real Polynesians, not just the smiling people at the fancy hotel and we found out how genuinely friendly most of them are. Also, because there were so few travelers in their towns, we were a novelty to the local people instead of a constant nuisance or just a source of income.

We are exaggerating to a small degree because we are subject to the movements of our ship & the desires of our captain & co-captain (when airline pilots run ships they have funny names for things…) but that really doesn’t interfere as most of us are ready to move on each time that we do.

We also experienced lots of other “non-tourist” things, like grocery shopping in a foreign language, and buying spare parts. Fortunately for us, in both Mexico and French Polynesia we had the use of specialized-for-traveling-sailors Spanish and French dictionaries, for things like the port side of the boat and the head gasket of your engine. Try to explain those with a basic high school or even university level language class!

We’re not saying that we are somehow “better” than the typical tourist; just that what we are looking for and our overall experiences are vastly different. We also put up with more headaches. Like a lack of air conditioning, slow travel and small living conditions. Our movements are restricted by weather windows and if our boat breaks or we lose something overboard we can’t just call someone like for a rental car; we have to deal with it. (There are no boat yards and shipping parts out here is not cheap.)

We also don’t get the benefits of personal service, which means we mostly do our own dishes. Oh yes, and we are sailing a 44 foot boat though the middle of the ocean hundreds of miles from any form of rescue…but to us that’s kind of awesome 😉

We prefer this style of travel. It’s cheaper, more self-reliant and you get to see what we think are the “cool” stuff. You get to connect with people…and get your butt handed to you in ping-pong.

Tahiti will be interesting as we will become tourists in a tourist town for the first time in several months.

Would you be willing to take on a few discomforts and a couple of manageable risks in order to sail the world?

March 3, 2011

So where do you get a pizza?

Avatoru, Rangiroa, Tuamotu, French Polynesia

The quest for sustenance is more complex than you might imagine.

First off, you may not recall that Greg is the ship’s only French speaker (and by “speaker” we mean a vocab of about 100 words…and about 7 verbs.) So when he’s not around and often even when he is, obtaining food requires our fellow crewmembers to overcome certain linguistic hurdles. Even on the few occasions where there is some level of reasonable verbal communications, cultural obstacles also seek to derail us. Our attempts to surmount these challenges are met with varying degrees of success:

When repeated communications attempts fail or what happens more often is that our wallets can not bear the strain of eating out more than once a week without mortgaging a first born child (which, oddly enough, no one on this ship actually has) we must instead resort to our own dwindling Mexican shipboard supplies to sustain our appetites. Which, after months of isolation from the necessities of life (like Trader Joe’s) those precious stores are beginning to run “a little thin” by our fellow crewmember’s standards.

Ok, you know, we have no idea how many cartons of rice milk they had onboard when we left Mexico. We also never actually even saw where they stored all of this milk on the 44 foot boat that we have all been living on together for several months now. Think about that for a second, we never saw the rice milk on the boat, and it’s not like it doesn’t take up some space. This ship has more secret storage compartments than the Millennium Falcon.

We do alright though. Mostly based on these meager and vastly depleted supplies we manage to cobble together rudimentary meals that we share with our fellow cruisers:

Alright, in all seriousness, for those of you planning on plying the seas of the South Pacific, cheap Mexican beer (Pacifico mostly) is a viable form of forex currency out here and the exchange rate is through the roof! Those yellow cans are greeted with sighs of satisfaction and envious looks when a captain brings out a drink at dinner. A sign of true friendship between cruisers is to share one’s “Mexican beer stash.” Being as Hinano, the local brew, comes in at least $5 US per can at the grocery store, spending a few pesos on some Mexican beer is one of the smartest investments in ensuring popularity with your fellow cruisers that you can make before departing.

As for us? Suppose we’ll just have to muddle through on Tahitian wine and French baguette pizza.

February 28, 2011

Land, Sea and Air Critters

Outside of town we find the other inhabitants of the atoll: the wildlife.

Bored with getting schooled by 9 year old island ping-pong champions? Well then, your new playmate can be as close as the nearest coconut crab hole:

Some of you may not remember Greg’s previous encounters with the avian species but he has extensive diplomatic experience in “aggressive negations” with:

– Seagulls in San Diego

– Boobies in crossing the South Pacific

– And now, the finches of French Polynesia

We would be remiss to mention the creatures of Rangiroa and omit the diving. Like Fakarava, Rangiroa is world-renown for its dive areas and the water is crystal clear. The difference is that Rangiroa is far more accessible (remember the daily flights) and also far more developed. As a result, there are a lot more divers that swim in Rangiroa’s lagoon and the fish are actually very accustomed to humans in the water. The fish actually swim towards the dingy instead of away from it and when we tied up and jumped into the water we found ourselves immediately swarmed by a cloud of butterfly fish!

Greg has been told by his shipmates that by learning to dive in French Polynesia he is “spoiled for life” on diving. Wait, there are places in the world where you don’t see at least 10 sharks per dive and have to beat off the cornucopia of rainbow fish with a stick?

February 17, 2011

Shopping in remote French Polynesian islands

Avatoru, Rangiroa, Tuamotu, French Polynesia

So the supplies that make it off the ship, into the boat, onto the pier and survive the on dock feeding frenzy go to one of three places:

– One of the local hotels / bars like the one beside the entrance pass

– One of the three stores in town.

The largest of these stores is Magazin (French for “store”) Daniel, which is so important as to be noted in our guidebooks as “the best supermarket on the island”. So this, according to our printed guidebooks mind you, is the best supermarket in the main city of the largest, most developed, most populous island of the 78 atolls of the Tuamotu chain. Here’s the tour:

And as a special treat for all of Greg’s fellow sci-fi nerd friends out there, look what he found!

If you don’t get it, it’s ok, he forgives you. If you do get it, you know why he put it up here… so awesome!

Oh the third place stuff from the boats go? Like we mentioned before, some stuff is custom ordered. Which is why this video is so amazing:

Greg getting his butt handed to him by an island kid in a game of ping pong is not remarkable. It’s the cultural significance of the thing! (no, not of me getting power slammed by a 10 year old, why are you fixated on that!?) It was the ping pong table, focus on his table! (I might note I scored some points.) What is remarkable is that the table was there in the first place. This most assuredly overshadows any *cough* – minor – *cough* point spread difference there may have been.

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Tag: Sailing

Further experiments in tourism

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Mind the Jetwash

Like this:

The Little Boat That DID!

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We’ve Reached Civilization Indeed!

Like this:

The First Place You Can Actually Name!

Like this:

When white people mangle Polynesian traditions

Like this:

Traveler or Tourist?

Like this:

So where do you get a pizza?

Like this:

Land, Sea and Air Critters

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Shopping in remote French Polynesian islands

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