Pitufa.at

A low-battery alarm sounded a few seconds after take-off, but Droney was already too far out to make it home safely. In such a case an automatic descent is meant to save a drone with a failing battery pack, but when flying over water a controlled emergency landing just ends in a big SPLASH.
Our MavicAir gave us wonderful views of our favourite places over the last 5 years. Here are some of our favourite shots from French Polynesia, Fiji, the Solomons and Papa New Guinea. Good-bye Droney, I already miss the bird perspective it gave us, the happy “ready for take-off” melody and the rebellious attempt to escape one more time at the end of each flight when Christian stretched out his hand to catch it.

We wish you all happy holidays, fun and joy celebrating whatever you believe in (or not)
Our ailing world needs us to be tolerant and to work together to tackle the really important problems…

Merry xmas from an ideal Pitufa crew

and from the real Pitufa crew

We had heard that Chuuk was a diver’s paradise and expected a cute, touristy place. Instead we found a dirty, run-down little town with lots of closed shops, dilapidated buildings and a big, official rubbish dump smack on the seaside…
We also expected an American range in the shops (Micronesia is closely affiliated with the US), but the amount of ultra-processed food full of corn syrup and saturated fat was still shocking. We couldn’t even find milk powder that contains just milk (like everywhere else in the Pacific)–the only kind available contains sweeteners and all kinds of additives. No wonder diabetes is a big problem here…
After almost 3 months without supermarkets we were running low on basics (despite our own garden and all the preserves we made in times of plenty in PNG, so we still stocked up on staple food (cheaper than anywhere else in the Pacific), but looking for vegetables we only found artificial-looking jumbo veg on steroids–all imported from the US. Even the eggs come from California!!
Apart from the doubtful nutritional value it’s also sad to see a Pacific nation making itself completely dependent of imported food. Almost nobody grows vegetables here (apart from the usual suspects taro, breadfruit, bananas and papaya), shop owners blame lazy locals, locals blame poor soil and the next problem is that there are no seeds available: ACE hardware sells soil and seed growing kits, but no actual seeds! Turns out the laws on importing seeds are so strict that only the ministry of agriculture is allowed to give out seeds and they don’t. We found their office in an unmarked building on the outskirts of town without a sign outside…
Real development aid would be a campaign to raise awareness for improving soil with compost and home-made eco-fertiliser and seeds and crops easily available together with workshops on how to successfully plant… I’ll try and write to government agencies and development aid organisations about this. So annoying. So stupid. And could be so easily improved…

Saturday’s a busy day in the village, everywhere food is prepared in advance for Sunday, as the strict Christians here don’t light fires on the Lord’s day. We strolled through the village last Saturday, watched the proceedings and were in invited by the chief to join them for dinner. So we went home and started cooking ourselves to be able to contribute to the feast.
Just as we were getting ready to go ashore, the wind picked up during a squall from the west, we quickly started pitching on a leeshore on the eastern side of the atoll. A quick check on windy: they had changed the forecast to NW squalls during the night–impossible to spend the night on the mooring off the village in such conditions. So we quickly wrote an apologetic message to the chief, used the last light to motor to the protected northern corner–and ended up eating the food we had prepared for shore over the next three days while it was raining and blowing.
That’s the cruising life, our schedule is dictated by the wind

Verona, one of the teachers, gave us some grilled fish and breadfruit as we were walking past

At the chief’s house the family was preparing coconut milk

Grating taro

and preparing buns from wheat flour

The bread oven looks simple

but is actually quite sophisticated with lower and upper heat!

Pigs are tied up everywhere, but they have another few weeks to live–until Christmas…

Cloud Access lets you keep an eye on your boat from anywhere with Internet access. Use Pitufino’s AnchorWatch app while you’re ashore and on the way back from the restaurant to the bay that filled up with other boats, toggle your anchor light to find yours amidst the sea of lights. While your boat is in the marina, monitor your batteries and bilge alarms from home and receive notifications when alarms get triggered.

Cloud Access not only gives you real-time access to your Pitufino, but you can store position reports, logbook entries and soon many other useful data (such as battery stats, weather, or sailing performance) into our database. Thus providing tracking or fleet control services, and soon more such as logbook management and polar diagram creation.

Cloud Access requires your Pitufino to be connected to a router with Internet access, that can be for example your Marina’s Wi-Fi, the hotspot of a mobile phone, a router with SIM card, and for offshore use Starlink or Iridium Go.

The pass of an atoll is the bustling centre of its underwater life with corals providing a home for millions of little swarmfish hiding in delicate species like staghorn, groups of surgeons and parrots as well as couples of butterflies roaming the slopes, groupers and morrays hiding in crevices, swarms of snappers in the deeper water and barracudas, sharks and trevallies passing by. It’s also the most important fishing ground and therefore the base of nutrition for remote communities, like here in Kapingamarangi.
We hardly believed our eyes, when we spotted a poster in the mayor’s office, showing a gigantic underwater blast that produced a water column reaching high into the sky. Imagine the impact of such an explosion with all fish in the vicinity killed, the coral shredded to rubble!Reading the poster, we couldn’t believe that the US were boasting about “expanding the pass” as development aid for the atoll… And that didn’t happen sometime in the last century when people still had no idea about enviromental impacts, no, they committed this crazy operation in 2021!!
We asked the mayor and were told that locals were not allowed in the vicinity of the blast and apparently they were not warned about the impact the blast would have. It was meant to widen the pass, so the supply ship would come into the lagoon, but brace yourselves for the best bit: the supply ship still stays outside despite the wider channel, so the locals still have to go out in their little boats to deliver copra and get their shipments. Nothing achieved, horrible damage done. But I’m sure the project sounded great when it was announced as development aid.
The side of the pass that was blasted is still a lifeless desert of coral rubble with no young recruits growing and no fish around. Money well spent.

Turtles are still hunted and eaten on most islands in the Pacific, the only exceptions are touristy places (where the locals are encouraged to protect them as an attraction for visitors) and around very developed areas, where environmental organisations have been raising awareness for the protection of endangered species. We try the same and often include turtles in the presentations we do at schools, explaining their role in the eco-system and how so many die in the nets of big fishing fleets and due to plastic pollution that it’s no longer sustainable for islanders to hunt them like its their tradition… The only places where we’ve met lots of turtles that are not even afraid of humans, has been in very remote, uninhabited places and around islands with strict seventh day adventist churches (as their religion prohibits the consumption of marine animals without scales…).
In Kapingamarangi we see even less turtles when going snorkeling than on the atolls of PNG, where we’ve just come from–only one small specimen so far. Yesterday, our friend Twinson, the policeman, came by with his boat after a fishing trip to offer us some tuna. I was horrified to see a small turtle lying on its back among the fish the three men had caught. I asked if the poor thing was still alive (yes, yes) and tried to explain that it was still very small, too small to be caught, but they just laughed and said it was good meat. So I asked if I could buy it from them, but Twinson refused with a smile, no money needed, I could have it for free. Again I tried to explain that we see so few turtles anymore and that it would be really good to protect them now to still have some for the future, but I don’t think they understood or agreed. Twinson gestured to the boy at the bow, who grabbed the turtle at its flipper and hauled it over the side. I was worried that it was too hurt or weak to swim (it had looked dead in the boat), but the little creature set off like shot from a cannon and was gone from sight within a second.
I hope it has learned its lesson, will give humans a wide berth from now on, and will grow to be a huge, wise, old turtle.
I didn’t take pictures yesterday, but here’s an unafraid specimen we met in the Line Islands

It’s never great when the water alarm in the bilge goes off with a high-pitched BEEEEP, but it’s especially disconcerting when you’re out on the ocean with still 60 nm to go to land… The first step is to lift the floorboard, take out the alarm and silence the deafening noise to be able to think again. The next step is nasty: put a finger into the sloshing brew and taste it–fuck, saltwater!
That’s when simple unease turns into dread.
Fortunately a hasty search for the dripping culprit revealed it was just the watermaker, so we turned it off, got out our cherished Stanley (the wet/dry vacuum cleaner) and Christian quickly got the bilge dry, while I was comforting Smurfy in the aft cabin–Smurfy is terrified of noisy Stanley. And all that on a pitching, rolling boat in light winds and confused seas.
Once we were at anchor, Christian dismounted the feed pump (with the helping paws of Smurfy), changed the pump head and the watermaker’s running again without any leaks!

Have you seen videos of people hypnotising chickens and even sharks by rolling them on their backs and stroking them from the collarbone down their belly? I thought that magic might knock out crocodiles as well, so I grabbed ours and behold: it worked!