Pitufa.at

Our little ship’s cat died last week. I still hear her everywhere and see her everywhere. Our day was so full of cat rituals: sunbathing and petting session in the morning, making sure she ate a few bites every few hours, waking her during the day so she’d be tired at night, sitting out in the cockpit during the evenings to ‘air’ the cat, then… Continue reading »

Our good friend Liesbet has published a book about her life as a cruiser, nomad and citizen of the earth. Check out her adventures on https://www.roamingabout.com/about-plunge/

The Austral islands are notorious for unstable, bad weather and during a La Niña phase (as we have this year) it’s supposed to be even cooler and rainier than usually. We therefore had rather low expectations weatherwise when we sailed to Raivavae at the beginning of December. We mainly wanted to keep our elderly cat ‘cool’ (she suffers in hot temperatures) and quietly work most… Continue reading »

After an intial lockdown between March and July 2020, French Polynesia opened its borders and Covid arrived here shortly after. Ironically a local Politician brought the Virus back from France–presumably from some conference about avoiding the spreading of Covid… The Polynesians seemed very orderly and determined to hold the virus at bay, but in the end it got out of control with many cases in… Continue reading »

Polynesian peoples live all across the Pacific: New Zealand, Tonga, Tuvalu, Samoa, Cooks Islands, French Polynesia as far up as Hawaii–apparently the ‘Lapita’ culture initally started out from an area around Taiwan and slowly discovered the Pacific islands eastwards. Once the discoverers settled down on the far stretched island groups they still had trading connections, but over the centuries they lost contact. Nowadays Polynesians from… Continue reading »

At the moment we’re having incredibly stable summer weather here in the Australs, hardly a breeze and rather humid. We’ve used the calm conditions to take down the high-cut yankee foresail in order to replace it with the bigger genoa that we’ll be using next. The genoa needs some maintenance first, so the sewing machine projects go on. Friends just recently mentioned that according to… Continue reading »

Raivavae has never seen so many sailboats at once (15 now) and as they are mainly kiddy boats and kite surfers they’re all hanging out at Motu Vaiamanu (also called ‘Piscine’, swimming pool–perfect for kids to play on the beach and kiters). That’s also the anchorage most locals recommend to sailboats and the owners have a little snack there and organise picnics for tourists (and… Continue reading »

Due to the Covid-19 situation most island states remain closed (Fiji is open, so a few boats went there and we hope they fared well in the cyclone that just hit Fiji badly…). Boats that would normally have continued west have stayed in French Poly, new ones have arrived, so there are more cruisers around this cyclone season than usually. Raivavae hardly ever sees more… Continue reading »

The alligator fake leather’s just a protective cover for the sofa mattress, on top of that (and on all the other 10 cushions around the saloon) we now have to sew fabric covers. Something unicoloured would of course look elegant, but a light colour’s waaay too easily stained and a dark colour would make the salon too gloomy. Thinking of cookie crumbles (especially on passage),… Continue reading »

Last time we did the upholstery in our saloon with low-quality fabric from Panama that went blotchy and ugly soon and had to be redone every other year. The mattress foam we got in Tahiti was even worse. Now, with new foam and fabric, we wanted to be on the safe side and decided to do the main seating area (and sleeping matress for in… Continue reading »