Pitufa.at

There’s a 3 day long cultural festival going on in Rikitea at the moment. Groups from Hao (Tuamotus), Hiva Oa (Marquesas), Tubuai (Australes), Faaa (Tahiti) and even Rapa Nui (Easter Island) have arrived, events take place every evening and it’s great to see and hear the differences in their dances and choirs. The anchorage has filled up with boats, almost 30 are anchored here at the moment.
Unfortunately the weather’s not playing along. It’s blowing hard from the SE, the dancers are shivering while waiting for their performances and the cruisers watch in their foul-weather gear On the first day it was still sunny, yesterday cloudy and today it’s raining…

This year the summer weather in the Gambier hasn’t been great and now it seems that it’s coming to an early end. The second mara’amu (strong southeasterly wind) is bringing chilly airmasses to us and a sniff of winter’s in the wind.
We’ve been really busy between boat projects (e.g. we got new foam from Tahiti and redid our sofa including new upholstery), writing and the usual daily chores. Whenever the weather was nice we got out for some fun activities with friends–sticking to our ‘carpe diem’ approach to avoid getting frustrated in unreliable weather…

This summer we get more windy and rainy weather here in the Gambier than usually. We don’t mind so much as we have plenty of jobs on our to-do list. At the moment the southeasterly’s blowing hard, but we’re tucked into a little, protected bay getting some work done. So far we’ve done engine maintenance (changed diesel and oil filters followed by a thorough bilge-cleaning), maintenance on the watermaker and the past two days were dedicated to sails: the leech line of our yankee headsail had chafed through, so we took the sail down and sewed patches over the damaged parts (fortunately our old ‘Pfaff’ household machine’s up to such work…). Today we stowed it away, got the big genoa up that we use for downwind sailing and rearranged the forecabin.

The weather forecast for tomorrow looks better, so maybe we’ll get off the boat for a change. There are no trails on this side of Taravai, but equipped with a machete, long sleeves and trousers and gloves we should be able to make our own path through the reed;-)

The weather’s back to gorgeous summer conditions here and we’re exploring the more remote islands of the archipelago.

Just now that we have a visitor (my dad is here) the weather has turned unseasonably nasty in the Gambier. A trough with fronts, strong winds and lots of rain has kept us mostly on the boat for the past 4 days. There were 30 boats in Rikitea, which made life in the anchorage quite exciting when the boats were swirled around in gusts and some of them dragged. Now we hope for some settled weather!

Ever since we arrived in the Gambier we’ve had perfect sunny, breezy and hot summer weather. We really needed these conditions after the rainy time in Rapa Iti–we had accumulated two laundry bags full of humid clothes (yuck) and due to the lack of circulation the interior of the boat was mouldy all over.

We stayed out on the motus, spent a week doing laundry in the mornings, cleaning furniture afterwards (first with vinegar then with oil, we call it the ‘salad treatment) and we still found time to go snorkeling in the afternoon and hang out with friends.