Pitufa.at

The day I left Austria it was snowing, during the day in Tahiti I was sweating and suffering in the humid and hot climate, but arriving in the Gambier I already felt the change in the seasons. The days are still warm and out of the wind in the sun it’s even hot, but at night it gets chilly and the water temperature is also noticeably cooling down. Leeloo is growing a thicker fur and insists on sleeping under the blanket (instead of on top of it) and we are slowly preparing to head further north towards the Tuamotus.

The flight back was fortunately quite eventless, apart from minor nuisances like a bunch of schoolkids who chatted relentlessly all night, a polynesian woman who fell asleep over her own seat, the empty one next to her and half of mine and a french woman who refused to pull down the blinds next to her and had shouting arguments over it with the flight personnel. The whole procedure of flying with waiting times, followed by sprints across the airport to catch connections and security rituals in between is annoying and thinking of the fuel a plane consumes and on top of all the crazy amount of rubbish only one flight produces (food trays, a new plastic cup for a sip of water…) is simply depressing.

Anyway, now I’m back home on Pitufa and deliriously happy
Yesterday we anchored off the gorgeous little bird-motu Tauna and planned on having a lazy day. As Christian was out of bread (he claims his attempts all ended rock-hard) my lazy day started at 6 with making dough After breakfast with warm, crispy bread we took the dinghy out to the motu and walked around marveling at the nesting terns and noddies and right afterwards we snorkeled around the bommies off the island (and as we were already in the water scraped algae off the bottom of Pitufa). Then we had a lazy afternoon (except that the watermaker made funny noises, so we disconnected the broken booster pump and as the bilge was already open we decided to clean it )

Home sweet home

As cruisers we are used to make our own bread (without a bread-making machine), grow sprouts and make yoghurt (without a yoghurt-maker). Landlubbers are of course used to having a supermarket nearby, so I fully understand that they mostly don’t feel the need to put time and effort into such things. Making yoghurt from an existing culture on the other hand is so simple that I had to show my mom how it’s done. At first she didn’t believe me and then she thought it must be a miracle:
Buy a cup of yoghurt, eat most of it and when there are only a few spoonfuls left, fill the cup up with milk, put it on top of the radiator for a day and behold: the cup’s full of yoghurt again. This way you don’t just save money, but also plastic packaging. We’ve repeated the process now 3 times and my Mom’s still fascinated

In the Gambier the nights are getting colder and summer is coming to its end while here in Austria the first flowers are blooming and tender new leaves are growing on trees and shrubs.
After so many years in the tropics I marvel at the miracle of spring even though I’m shivering in temperatures that seem freezing cold to me, while the rest of Austria is talking about the warmest March in 250 years…

Living in peaceful, happy French Polynesia we sometimes manage to forget about the political and economical crises that buffet the planet, but whenever we open news pages and often when we receive e-mails the vibes are decidedly negative. More crimes, more wars, more terrorist attacks, more refugees, more scandals, more unemployed people, more fear and a general feeling that things are getting worse.

The mass media are usually known to fuel the public fears with sensationalist reports, but today I saw a documentary with a refreshingly different approach (ORF 1, made by Hanno Settele, a seasoned foreign correspondent) that showed the effects of vague fears (cocooning, locking yourself in with alarm systems, building bunkers, buying weapons, attending self-defense classes, etc.) and those who profit from them. All this is happening in Austria, which was ranked 3rd most peaceful country in the Global Peace Index 2016 (just in comparison, France is No 46 and just beat the UK that come on 47 while the US are far behind as 103…) and where the statistics show slightly sinking crime rates since 2000…

“Fear is strange soil. Mainly it grows obedience like corn, which grows in rows and makes weeding easy. But sometimes it grows the potatoes of defiance, which flourish underground.” (Terry Pratchett, Small Gods)

Getting from the Gambier via Tahiti, Los Angeles, Paris and Vienna to my Mom’s home in Upper Austria is a tiring journey even when all connections work out perfectly, but with the friendly help of the US government it turned into a 6 day odyssey.
In Tahiti the Air France personnel didn’t let me check in due to a problem with my ESTA visa (necessary for the stopover in L.A.) so on Sunday morning I had to watch the plane leave without me, knowing that my mom was waiting for me in Austria. The next morning the ladies at the Air france office in Papeete were apologetic and helpful, but there was no seat available before Wednesday–and that one only to Paris. Steve and Lili were great and supportive and let me stay on Liward for 4 nights instead of one and tried to cheer me up–I wasn’t a happy smurf…

On Wednesday I took the plane to Paris, spent a night there and finally arrived in Austria on Friday… Now I’m acting as a second and third hand for my temporarily single-handed Mom who is still black and blue from the fall and has her left arm immobilised in a sling to give the operated shoulder time to heal.

In the meantime Christian’s a single-hander (supported by 4 paws) in the Gambier Islands…

We’ve been crazy busy during the past week. We finished the watertank project: cut the aluminium plates for the cover, drilled 140 holes, cut threads for the 140 screws, put it in place, adjusted the height on the wooden board under the sofa and got the saloon back into living-room shape, etc. Other cruisers were willing to take over the house-sitting, so we got garden and house ready, moved out of the house (incredible how much stuff we accumulated during only 2 months) and back on Pitufa.

My mom broke her shoulder, so I’ll fly to Austria for 3 weeks. Arranging the flight from a location without internet or phone connection would have been impossible without the help of my brother and cruiser friends over here in Rikitea. Steve and Lili (SY Liward) are back in Tahiti and will let me spend the night on their boat again (I have one night between the inter-island flight and the international connection). Thanks to everybody who helped out, offered active and moral support!!

Christian and Leeloo stay here in Rikitea. Some boats have already left for the Tuamotus, but new ones will start arriving from Panama soon, so hopefully Christian won’t get too bored

When we wanted to head back to Taravai after the festival the windlass quit on us. We’d been carrying around new brushes for it for a month already, but had never got round to installing them between the work on the watertank, the house, the garden and everything around.
Christian had to manually lift the anchor (no fun with 60 metres of chain down in 18 metres depth…) and on Monday we tackled the job.

After opening the windlass twice already in the past year the formerly dreaded job seemed like (almost) routine: emptying the forecabin and forepeak to reach the windlass from underneath, opening the windlass, installing the new brushes (they needed some adjusting and makeshifting) and everything back into place–the job took a whole day, but now the windlass is working again!