Pitufa.at

I’ve just finished a short summary of our visit to the Eastern and Northeastern Islands of PNG. This area used to be quite popular, but for the last decade rumours of violence and crime (that are certainly true for parts of the mainland) have kept sailboats kept away. We enjoyed the little islands very much and would like to encourage more cruisers to visit–the islanders… Continue reading »

… and the last 14 of these years 24/7 365 aboard our Pitufa–I suppose these count double?? We got lucky and found each other as teenagers, so we got to grow (up) together

We’ve been busy all week, but now the solar installation for Simon is finished! Christian (and plenty of helping hands) mounted 3 of our used panels together to have one big panel Then Simon’s brother Charles built a post where the panel will have a maximum of sunshine Then we had to lead a mighty long cable high up to keep it safe from playing… Continue reading »

We ordered a new chain and new solar panels from Australia and had them sent to a freightforwarding company and they were meant to send them here on a containership. Sounds simple, but it turned into an epic story when OPFL in Brisbane after being super responsive suddenly no longer reacted to emails or calls. Just when we were convinced that they had sold all… Continue reading »

We’ve just spent 3 days on Honiara’s dusty roads chasing parts for the mooring and solar installation and of course we’ve done some more provisioning for ourselves. Once again everything went fine, nothing got stolen and yesterday we sailed over to Simon’s bay again! We didn’t get much sleep in the loud and rolly anchorage in Honiara and this time Christian caught a big-city bug,… Continue reading »

Incredible, but true, our kitten’s already grown up. He’s still a bit crazy, but getting better (or so we tell ourselves). Unfortunately there’s no veterinary in the Solomon Islands, so we still haven’t been able to have him neutered. For now we just hope that he won’t start marking his territory anytime soon as he can smell neither competing rivals nor lady cats out here… Continue reading »

We often have groups of squid and cuttlefish hanging out around the boat. They are really interesting to watch communicating with each other with intricate changes of colour, swimming forwards, backwards and even sideways looking like aliens. We always wondered why they were so interested in the anchor chain, now we know: they are looking for a convenient substrate to attach their eggs! The poor… Continue reading »

In Taro we saw a big freighter loading logs and asked the guys at customs and immigration about it: they said that logging was done on a big scale by Malayan companies. Asked about regulations for reforestation they just sadly smiled and shook their heads–theoretically maybe, but neither the logging companies nor the land owners actually replant trees. So lush rain forest is turned into… Continue reading »