Pitufa.at

We met plenty of friendly people again in Raivavae, but the anti-cruiser campagne led by the protestant priest here made us somewhat uncomfortable (rumours, nasty facebook comments, fake news) so we decided to leave for Rapa, even though the weather forecast isn’t ideal. Hopefully it’ll turn out okay… 290 nm to go

We wish everybody who’s sailing along on our blog a merry Christmas and a happy, healthy, successful year 2022 with opening borders and some normality after these crazy times…

I still haven’t grown tired of developing my Pitufino nav gateway–rather the opposite, I have spent a lot of time in improving it and adding new features. A great portion of the work on version V1.4.0 dealt with the networking core: new chip manufacturer SDK, time-out issues, UDP unicast streams, UDP unicast probes as alternative for broadcast, ICMP to close such UDP streams, TCP server for direct NMEA2000 data, and a new, much faster web server. The Sailing Instruments web app has got night colors and the Multi Display web app has got several new display types. Here are a few screen shots from those running on my Samsung Android phone. For more info see the Pitufino page.

New Pearl Collection

Rainy days are creative days--new designs made on Pitufa

(23 photos)

I’ve had a creative phase again, got the dremel out and played with pretty things. I’m not a jewellery person, but the shiny balls that grow here keep inspiring me…

Last week we had lots of fabulous encounters with boisterous, curious, cute “teenager” birds–cute brown boobies. On most inhabited atolls of the Tuamotus there are no more ground nesting birds and even here on uninhabited Tahanea too many visiting copra workers (but also thoughtless cruisers) have shied away nesting couples from many of the motu on the remote side of the atoll. This year we have taken Pitufa to the Western side of the atoll, which is bommie-strewn and difficult to navigate. There we have adventurously anchored off little islets in the lagoon or sometimes just big coral heads with a few shrubs growing on them. Brown boobies have found a refuge there and as soon as we anchored Pitufa, we had a crowd of young brown boobies circling the boat–still practising how to fly and land, but eager for entertainment. They have never met people in their young lives, so they are quite tame and unafraid. They fearlessly landed on the railing, clumsily holding on to the lifeline while curiously watching our every move. One of them crash-landed on the aft-deck–fortunately he wasn’t hurt. We sat quietly in the cockpit while he wandered around, tried everything with his beak (lines, shoes, etc.) and finally did a plunge-dive from the swimming ladder. And no, he did not poop all over the deck–but then we also didn’t shout and wave to scare him away (like many boaters would have done). Of course we also didn’t go ashore and left the nesting parents in peace.

The term ‘brown booby’ is misleading: only the young birds are dark-brown (and to be honest quite ugly). The adults are black, with a gleaming white chest. The name ‘booby’ apparently is derived from Spanish ‘bobo’ (stupid) and in all other languages we know they also have some derogative name, because they tend to land on boats and are therefore easy to catch. Sailors also effortlessly killed masses of them as provisioning on lonely islands. Young brown boobies have a tendency to relentlessly plunge-dive for trolled lures (we get the fishing lines in as soon as we have boobies circling the boat), so again cruisers call them stupid for that behaviour. Since when is curiosity a sign of stupidity? I rather think it’s a strong indication that they are quite smart. Looking into their startling bright grey-blue eyes you see a sparkling intelligence gazing back.

We sent this article in for Leeloo’s 20th birthday, but it took a while to get published

Birgit Hackl: Cruisin’ with a Cat, Cruising World, November/December 2021.