Pitufa.at

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 Rapa are used to rough weather and considered this ‘blow’ a breezy summerday

Only about 400 people live on Rapa. There is no airport and the supply ship calls only once a month, so the people rely mainly on their own resources and skills. When something needs to be done or fixed, everyone helps out. This generosity is also extended to visiting strangers. So far sailboats are still welcome here, but I suppose a single negative experience might also change the atmosphere here. We just hope that sailors following in our wake will also be respectful of the traditions and won’t take advantage of the generosity the locals show visitors.

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 do a second one. We brought out the two blocks with Pitufa and placed them on a 6 m spot in the bay, where it’s easy to check!!

Thanks a lot to…
…the commune of Rapa Iti for their approval and for donating the blocks and chain
…Alex (chief of the firefighters here in Rapa) for all the welding and bending and for spending all Saturday on the project
…our friends on SY Garulfo for their hard work and donated gear
…and last but not least to Pitufa for being such a sturdy and strong lady–she nonchalantly crossed the bay with the huge mooring blocks dangling from her bow.

The new mooring consists of two 750 kg blocks, 14 mm chain and 25 mm rope. It is located at S 27°36.700′ W 144°19.870′

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 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.