Pitufa.at

One of the old plexi windows of our sprayhood got smashed in on the rough trip to Rapa. We ordered a roll from Tahiti and spent three days replacing the windows. Not an easy task to stuff so much material underneath Miss Pfaff (our sturdy sewing machine). They turned out surprisingly wrinkle-free and now we have a panorama view again! At least partially–the garden’s back… Continue reading »

The main bay of Rapa with its two villages is a windy place when it’s blowing from the east, in all other directions we don’t see steady winds, but strong gusts whirling down the mountains. This pictures shows Pitufa testing the new mooring in 45 knots… Local boats were still buzzing across the bay on that day, fishermen going out on the ocean–the people of… Continue reading »

Three years ago we built a mooring for sailboats with the municipality of Rapa, so visiting sailboats don’t have to anchor in the infamously difficult bay and will neither damage their gear not the beautiful staghorn coral. When we got back this year, we were happy to pick up our sturdy mooring and then we asked the mayor and community workers whether they wanted to… Continue reading »

We got a few concerned emails, because there was a Tsunami in the Pacific (after an eruption in Tonga) and a depression over French Polynesia (with seriously bad weather in the Northern Austral Islands and in Tahiti and the Societies). Neither of those affected us down here in our protected bay in Rapa Iti.

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… Continue reading »

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.

We just saw that one of our articles is on the online version of the Cruising World Magazine. Click here to read about home-brewing on a boat!

The Compass is another popular magazine (next to AllAtSea) that’s available for free in all the bigger chandleries throughout the Caribbean. We are therefore happy that they have published our article with tips and tricks to keep feline crew happy! Download the magazine here

Relying on other people’s waypoints for both anchorages and passage routes can be dangerous. Cruising blogs and compendia are full of bad or incomplete recommendations and generalizations from one-sample observations. It’s much safer to do proper research and practice the necessary skills to do your own route planning and make your own waypoints… Birgit Hackl, Christian Feldbauer: Waypoints–Boon or Bane?, All At Sea Caribbean, November… Continue reading »

The South Pacific Convergence Zone is having some fun with us at the moment. Its tail end is pointing towards French Polynesia and it seems the weather people are finding it impossible to predict how it will behave. The American GFS model and the European model predict completely contradicting wind wind directions and what we get in the end is usually not predicted by either… Continue reading »