Pitufa.at

The reason that we haven’t written any new blog entries during the last few days isn’t that there’s nothing to write about, but rather the opposite–we’ve been too busy to open the laptop once. Also, there’s no internet and the best time to send/receive mails on the SSB is in the evening and we were simply never at home in the evenings… Despite the fact that there’s only 4 boats in the bay (apart from an abandoned Russian boat) there’s always something going on. On the weekend we were invited to Irie (our old friends Mark and Liesbet arrived here 2 weeks before us), the next day we invited them over to Pitufa along with our neighbour Giorgio, an Italian singlehander. Sipping our sundowners we spontaneously decided to give the big ketch parked far out a call as well, Alan, the singlehander from New Zealand was glad to join us and so we had the entire population of the anchorage gathered in Pitufa’s little cockpit (even Leeloo was brave enough to sit with the crowd). Of cours e Giorgio countered with an invitation to his boat ‘Hoa Motu’ the next day and yesterday we all celebrated Alan’s birthday on his 60 feet ketch ‘Quintessa’. During the days we’ve of course started exploring the island. We’re surrounded by spectacular mountains with plenty of hiking tracks and so far we’ve been to a 200ft-waterfall and up a peak that’s towering high over the bay. Snorkeling’s not so great, because there’s no outer reef, but the coast is exposed to the power of the ocean. The water’s also quite dark–maybe it appears just that way because of the dark, volcanic rocks and there’s also lots of sediment in the water because of the frequent downpours Today we’ve stayed at home, baked bread, did laundry and serviced a winch–a complicated and time consuming process (one done, 8 more to go )