Pitufa.at

Polynesian peoples live all across the Pacific: New Zealand, Tonga, Tuvalu, Samoa, Cooks Islands, French Polynesia as far up as Hawaii–apparently the ‘Lapita’ culture initally started out from an area around Taiwan and slowly discovered the Pacific islands eastwards.

Once the discoverers settled down on the far stretched island groups they still had trading connections, but over the centuries they lost contact. Nowadays Polynesians from different areas can still communicate, basic words like ‘water’ (vai) have remained the same, but the languages have evolved and diversified. Some areas nowadays have an ‘r’ (but no ‘l’) (NZ, Cooks, French Poly), others have an ‘l’ but no ‘r’ (Hawaii, Samoa), etc.

Even within French Polynesia several languages exist. They were long suppressed by the colonial power–missionaries tried to get rid of the old religion, culture and languages and even in the 1980s speaking Polynesian languages was still forbidden at school… As a linguist I tried to get some insights as we were visiting the different islands and picked up some phrases:

- The language of the Marquesas sounds quite harsh (the greeting is “Ka oha!” and thank you ‘Kou tau’) and thanks to the cultural revival there since the 1980s it is used by most people.
- The Tahitian language (reo Tahiti) is much softer–it has lost its ‘k’ and replaced it with a glottal stop. The outrigger canoe that is pronounced vaka in in the Marquesas (as well as in the Gambier and Cook Islands) becomes a va’a. Listening on the streets of Tahiti, French seems to be the predominant language (often in a mix with reo Tahiti), but with TV programs, radio shows and classes at school reo Tahiti is still quite alive. The greeting is ‘ia orana’ and thank you ‘mauru’uru’ (pronounced maruru).
- The Paumotu of the Tuamotu islands contains a ‘k’ and a soft, nasal ‘ng’ (as can still be seen in island names like Fakarava and Rangiroa), but the young people speak a mix of French and ‘reo Tahiti’–only old people still speak pure Paumotu (and people look at you surprised when you greet them with the traditional “Kura ora!”).
- The Mangarevan language of the Gambier Islands sounds very pretty, but there the active supression of culture was very successful. Only some old people still speak pure Mangarevan, others mix it with French and reo Tahiti and kids seem to speak mainly French. Mangarevan contains a ‘k’ and a soft, nasal ‘ng’ and we were surprised to hear a very similar sounding language in the Cook Islands. The traditional greeting is ‘Ena koe!’ for one person, Ena korua for two and Ena kotou for more and to thank somebody you say maro’i.
- The languages of the Austral Islands are similar to Reo Tahiti, but walking around Raivavae we first thought we hadn’t understood quite right, when people greeted us with ‘Ia ogana’ instead of Ia orana. One person might have a speech impediment, but several? It turns out that here ‘g’ is pronounced whenever an ‘r’ is written in Reo Tahiti. So it’s not just Ia ogana, but maugu’ugu, the main village Rairua is called Gaigua and the island itself is called Gaivavae! A truly funny dialect.
- The remotest island Rapa Iti (or Oparo in the local language) has quite a distinct language that contains ‘k’ as well as ‘ng’. People greet you with ‘aronga’ and ‘tongia’ means thank you.

At the moment we’re having incredibly stable summer weather here in the Australs, hardly a breeze and rather humid. We’ve used the calm conditions to take down the high-cut yankee foresail in order to replace it with the bigger genoa that we’ll be using next. The genoa needs some maintenance first, so the sewing machine projects go on.

Friends just recently mentioned that according to our blog entries it looks like we have really crappy sails, because we’re constantly repairing them. Fact is, the set (main sail and genoa) we bought from Dustom Sails (Croatian company, dustom.com) 11 years ago are still in a very good shape (if you’re cruising in the Med, a great place to buy sails!!). We’re ‘using up’ older sails in the meantime (the set that came with the boat) as it seems pointless to carry around 9(!) sails and that’s why we’re doing all those little repairs.

Raivavae has never seen so many sailboats at once (15 now) and as they are mainly kiddy boats and kite surfers they’re all hanging out at Motu Vaiamanu (also called ‘Piscine’, swimming pool–perfect for kids to play on the beach and kiters). That’s also the anchorage most locals recommend to sailboats and the owners have a little snack there and organise picnics for tourists (and cruisers). Theoretically a perfect solution, but this year one local has started a campaign against cruisers. Probably influenced by the Tahitian propaganda he came over several times to the motu, told sailboats to leave with the old well-known arguments: we destroy the reef (every single boat in the anchorage lies on a floated chain even though the coral’s dead anyway), we pollute the lagoon (???) and we stay too long. Ironically enough the guy’s the owner of the shop in Vaiuru (magasin Teehu on the S side of Raivavae–avoid!!) and even though he claims to represent the opinion of the local people, everybody else we talked to is wonderfully friendly and not against sailboats… Still rather unpleasant to be harassed for New Year’s, but we wished him ia maita’i i te mau ‘oro’a matahiti ‘api (a happy new year ) anyway!

Most boats here are waiting for weather windows to head on to the Tuamotus, Gambier or Marquesas anyway, so Mr. Teehu will be happy and proud of himself when the fleet diminishes, but we’ll stay here for the rest of the cyclone season. We have lots of projects on our to-do list and need some quiet time to work productively. Another reason why we don’t sail much this year is our cat–Leeloo’s getting too old for passages and can’t take tropical heat anymore. Thus we’ll just hang out here for a few months, Christian can work on his programming project, I can get some writing done and the sewing machine will remain busy as well as we need a new dinghy cover, have to repair the lazy bag and do some maintenance on our sails.

Most people will agree that 2020 sucked. Seriously. For us it wasn’t just generally the dreadful covid situation with ruined plans, uncertainties and worries about future developments, but the death of my mum. It also seemed that we were unlucky with basically everything we tried, things broke, orders got lost, orders arrived damaged–just annoying.

As we sail into our tenth year aboard Pitufa we wish all those who virtually sail along a much better, healthy, eventful and pleasant year 2021!

Worldwide the rainforest is shrinking, at least on Pitufa the jungle’s taking over. We’ve had unsettled rainy and windy weather for the last week, ideal conditions to work inside–and for a jungle to grow. While Christian is working on his programming project I’m slowly sewing my way around the salon.

It’s not an easy job as each piece has a different size and format, many of them rounded, so I have to creatively invent each and every one. The motto of the upholsterer’s guild must be: “Thou shalt not do right angles on boats or any stupid layman (or laywoman) could remake thy precious sofa!”

Our Christmas this year is quite special as we are invited to a Polynesian wedding. Our friends here in Anatonu (N side of Raivavae) have done their best to organise this big event according to the pandemic rules. A very traditional wedding with earth ovens (umu), Tahitian dancing, etc. in combination with disinfectant, masks and distancing rules

The highest tree this year in Pitufa’s sprayhood garden happens to be a bell pepper plant, so we’ve declared it our Christmas tree.

Due to the Covid-19 situation most island states remain closed (Fiji is open, so a few boats went there and we hope they fared well in the cyclone that just hit Fiji badly…). Boats that would normally have continued west have stayed in French Poly, new ones have arrived, so there are more cruisers around this cyclone season than usually. Raivavae hardly ever sees more than 5 sailboats at the same time, but now about 15 are anchored around the lagoon.
We always experienced the population of the Austral Islands as extremely friendly, but yesterday a boat came by and told our neighbours that there were too many sailboats anchored off the motu and that we should leave… The owners of the motu organise (paid) BBQs and Picnics for cruisers, so we were more than surprised about that reaction. Everybody else in the village has been superfriendly so far, so we hope that it’s just one guy who probably got influenced by the defaming propaganda of the Tahitian media…

The alligator fake leather’s just a protective cover for the sofa mattress, on top of that (and on all the other 10 cushions around the saloon) we now have to sew fabric covers. Something unicoloured would of course look elegant, but a light colour’s waaay too easily stained and a dark colour would make the salon too gloomy. Thinking of cookie crumbles (especially on passage), cat food, cocoa, coffee or red wine accidents we went through the range the fabric store offered online and chose a wild leaf and fern pattern in green, mint, light-blue, brown and beige.

Now the first cover’s done and it’s indeed very camouflage–to an extent where it’s impossible to find sunglasses or other small items again and even the cat blends in to a dangerous degree (don’t sit on the cat!!).
we’re trying to get used to the new look. For now we start singing ‘Welcome to the jungle’ in Axl Rose’ best squeaky voice whenever we enter the salon

Last time we did the upholstery in our saloon with low-quality fabric from Panama that went blotchy and ugly soon and had to be redone every other year. The mattress foam we got in Tahiti was even worse. Now, with new foam and fabric, we wanted to be on the safe side and decided to do the main seating area (and sleeping matress for in between on passages and in rough anchorages) extra strong with a layer of waterproof fake leather underneath a fabric cover. Once we were dumb enough to forget to close the hatch above the couch on passage and had a wave splashing in, we tend to spill cocoa occasionally and our geriatric cat managed to puke on the sofa a few times already. So better safe than sorry…
The fake leather turned out to be in a quasi alligator pattern, but white. We had to get the cover on and off several times to measure it properly and each time we felt like wrestling with a very uncooperative albino alligator… It took us two days to finish the thing, but now it’s done and fits really nicely!