Pitufa.at

I enjoyed hanging out with those cute and nosy sharkies so much that I decided to get one!

Reading and watching the news you’d think French Polynesia was a nature paradise. Almost each week the president, PEW and other organisations announce new protection zones in the Pacific around Fr Poly , rahui areas around islands (traditional bans) and anchoring bans for the nastiest polluters–us cruisers. Turtles have been protected for a long time, the same goes for sharkies.
Unfortunately that’s just theory: protected areas are not supervised (and they exclude “traditional fishing” a term which includes basically everything but international fleets), many rahui are opened too regularly to make a change and turtles and sharks are still killed in fish traps for consumption on the islands (where nobody cares about the protection when mayor and police officer hunt as well) or even exported to Tahiti with nobody checking the supply boats.
Snorkeling in the Societies, many parts of the Australs and even in the Tuamotus you find empty reefs with a few tiny fishies that scatter in panic when they see a diver. With no fish to eat the algae, the reefs that are weakened by pollution (from shore) and global warming (caused by all of us) are soon overgrown. But is that reported on the media? Not at all. Local fisherman assure us that there’s plenty of fish (maybe they’ve never seen a reef with plenty of fish…), fishermen go out day after day and catch the last specimen, tiny reef fish are for sale on the market and next to the road.

We keep sending pictures and reports to the DIREN (ministry for environment), PEW (American organisation) and Te mana o te moana (turtle protection centre in Moorea), so far to no avail. It might make a change if more people pestered them, so please take the time to write an email and send pics if you see something that needs to be reported. Maybe they’ll listen eventually.
direction@environnement.gov.pf, jpetit@pewtrusts.org, info@temanaotemoana.org

Each morning we read the news and each morning we get upset about how we humans treat our planet. We can’t change those global issues, we can only try to make a small difference starting with ourselves. We tend to go one step further and address behaviour that we witness in our little world (e.g. anchoring in coral, disturbing bird colonies, treating remote places as a free all-you-can-eat buffet, disrespecting local customs, polluting, etc.). Doing so we have made some enemies. Well, we don’t really care as it we don’t want to be friends with people who disrespect mother nature anyway. We have also made friends with people who are well-meaning and acted just thoughtlessly
Just an example: Last month I had a doctor’s appointment and was horrified to see 5 guppies (little, very hardy fresh water fish) in a tiny vase displayed in the waiting room. Of course I couldn’t keep my big mouth shut and brought up the issue with the doc. She was flabbergasted, the fish had come with the office and she hadn’t given them much thought, so I explained the basic set-up of a fish tank. When I went back two weeks later, the guppies were swimming in an aquarium. A tiny victory, but a big deal for the guppies.
I think it DOES make sense to speak up for issues we care about. I hate it when people say that one person can’t make a change so they have an excuse to not even make an effort. If everybody tried just a little bit, there might still be hope.

After we had to interrupt our passage because of the broken track on the mast, the repair was rather quickly done, but we had missed our weather window. We need really stable weather for the 1.900 nautical miles to Fiji and it’s rare to find a weather window that actually lasts 2 weeks and goes all the way. Before Covid we could have stopped in the Cook Islands, Tonga and/or Samoa along the way, splitting the journey into shorter legs that are easier to plan, but unfortunately these countries have still not opened their borders for yachts. It seems absurd that borders are opening for tourists on planes, but remain closed for sailors who are much less at risk to bring a disease as we automatically spend several days (or weeks) in quarantine while underway to a new place.
We don’t want to risk getting trapped in an extended calm area as this would mean burning lots of diesel to motor out of it. The constant comparing of forecast models (“to leave or not to leave”‘s the daily question), keeping the boat (and provisioning lockers) in passage mode to be ready to head out spontaneously anytime is slightly getting on our nerves despite the best resolutions to be patient. We’re more than ready to sail west, into the sunset.

Christian Feldbauer, Birgit Hackl: KNOW YOUR WEATHER, Cruising World, April 2022. Read the online version of this article.

During a 30 knot squall the track for the genoa pole got ripped out of the mast–incredible with what extreme forces a sailboat has to deal, the big foresail is over 60 m2… No way we could manage the downwind trip without a genoa pole. We have to interrupt our trip for repairs.