Pitufa.at

I enjoyed hanging out with those cute and nosy sharkies so much that I decided to get one!

Reading and watching the news you’d think French Polynesia was a nature paradise. Almost each week the president, PEW and other organisations announce new protection zones in the Pacific around Fr Poly , rahui areas around islands (traditional bans) and anchoring bans for the nastiest polluters–us cruisers. Turtles have been protected for a long time, the same goes for sharkies. Unfortunately that’s just theory: protected… Continue reading »

Each morning we read the news and each morning we get upset about how we humans treat our planet. We can’t change those global issues, we can only try to make a small difference starting with ourselves. We tend to go one step further and address behaviour that we witness in our little world (e.g. anchoring in coral, disturbing bird colonies, treating remote places as… Continue reading »

After we had to interrupt our passage because of the broken track on the mast, the repair was rather quickly done, but we had missed our weather window. We need really stable weather for the 1.900 nautical miles to Fiji and it’s rare to find a weather window that actually lasts 2 weeks and goes all the way. Before Covid we could have stopped in… Continue reading »

We just did our check-out from Tahiti and had some hiccups along the way. It seems the different offices that deal with pleasure crafts don’t talk to each other Even though it the Capitainerie sent us an info sheet claiming that we had to send the check-out application to traffic maritime AND we got an email from them replying that we were free to pick… Continue reading »

Just as we were patching up the dinghy yesterday, the watermaker suddenly quit. Horror scenario. We carry a spare pump head and installed it today–fortunately the pump is running now again! A more serious issue would have been a big problem before a long passage.

We’ve had our dinghy for one and a half years and it’s been leaking from day one, that’s why it’s called “Wobbly”. It arrived with a transport damage: a hole was punched through the hypalon on the bottom, so the first thing we had to do was glue the damn thing in a very tricky spot. It continued leaking just a little bit (enough to… Continue reading »

Before a long passage the boat needs to be thoroughly checked and prepared: We have checked the rigg and changed the headsails to have the big genoa downwind (and repaired some seams as we were at it). Then the Yanmar got some attention: we cleaned the sea strainers, changed the engine oil, new coolant and yesterday a new impeller. Some engineer at Yanmar thought it… Continue reading »

We arrived this morning on the southern side of Tahiti Nui, where we’ll do a stop-over in a quiet area before braving the big city. Last year we perceived the anchorage as quiet (in comparison to Punaauia), today we find the constant droning of traffic on the coastal road deafening