Pitufa.at

Rarotonga is the main island of the Cook Islands. More than 10.000 people live on 67 km²–most of them in the capital Avarua and around the island on the narrow, coastal plane, the mountainous interior remains untouched.

Today we took a bus (there’s a very convenient regular clockwise and anti-clockwise service), went around the island and stopped in a few places. The high, volcanic island reminds us landscapewise of the Society Islands of French Polynesia, but unfortunately the fringing reef is still close to shore, leaving no space for a navigable lagoon. The only exception is a small pass on the east side that leads into a mini-lagoon with 4 motus. Everybody comes to this ‘lagoon’ for kayaking, snorkeling, etc.
The island seems very touristy compared to the places we’re used to, resorts and guest houses take up most of the shore line. At least there are no big hotels, just low bungalows along the white, fine beach that fringes most of the coast.

We’ve just come back home from a Sunday with our host family (church, lunch, hanging out), checked the weather forecast and it looks like we’ll have a Northeasterly window from Tuesday to Thursday which should take us down to Rarotonga where we can have our next break while waiting for Southeastlerlies for our final leg up to French Polynesia.

Christian’s actually feeling better, so just now we were joking if we should change the clearance and head back to Tonga–we could always sail back if things change, now that we know the way

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We are still at Palmerston atoll (Cook Islands), which unfortunately has no pass into the lagoon, but the islanders have put out 9 moorings to the west of the outer reef. The first two days we had southerly winds, which made the open anchorage very rough, but as soon as the wind turned to the Southeast the seas calmed down, even though it’s still blowing hard. In the beginning we were 4 boats here, but the other three have left westwards with the easterly winds and we’re the only ones here now.

Palmerston is a curious little community. In 1863 William Marsters, a ship’s carpenter and barrel maker, arrived on Palmerston with three Polynesian wives and annexed the uninhabited island from the British. The current population of 57 are almost all descendants of Marsters (and of course wives and husbands from other Cook islands). Even though they look Polynesian, their first language is English and they consider themselves more British than anything else. The community is well organised and equipped, there’s a big solar array for a public electricity network, a telephone network, internet, most houses have a few big freezers (they export fish), washing machines, etc. so the living standard is quite high. The only downside of their isolated location (no airfield, no regular boat service) is that it’s hard to visit other islands–a problem especially in the case of a medical emergencies. We saw quite a few graves of young children on the cemetery, even though the majority o
f the islanders lived more than 80 years.

Sailing boats who stop by here are welcomed by a host family, who monitors channel 16, comes out with the boat to take the cruisers ashore whenever they give a call and invite their guests to all kinds of activities. Our hosts Edward and Shirley had us over for lunch twice, on Sunday we’re invited to join them for church and lunch and on Monday I’ll give a ‘guest lecture’ at the local school (a taster course of Spanish) where the 24 kids of Palmerston (ranging between 6 and 18 years) get their primary and secondary education.

The supply ship only comes here twice a year, so cruisers are asked to contribute staple food (e.g. Shirley was out of flour, so we brought 4 bags over), equipment for the moorings and whatever else they can spare.

On our way east, the Cook Islands lie conveniently outspread to break up the long passage into small hops.

Looking for weather windows is an annoying pastime. Especially at times like now with a trough moving through (we have squally weather here now) the forecast models change every few hours. Today we have already requested 3 grib files via SSB radio, each time they look different and none of them is in accordance with what’s actually happening outside at the moment… We then start ‘sailing’ the cursor ahead on the map with the wind arrows, going through different options of when to head out. If you’re not familiar with grib files (we use the program zyGrib as a viewer) you can look at an online visualization of those grib files on windyty.com.

Anyway, we still don’t know whether it’s clever to sail out today as we’d get a good start followed by half a calm day, or whether we should stay until Sunday when (according to the current grib) we’d have a fast ride. But what if the gribs change in the meantime and we don’t make it to our next stop before the next wave of strong southeasterlies set in? Well, we’ll contemplate the next grib and let you know once we’re out again.