Pitufa.at

he last few days a wind has been blowing from the south bringing for the first time chilly air with it and a whiff of rough weather and icebergs far away down there. The sun is still burning hot, but autumn has reached the Gambier. We actually like the seasonal change that we experience here at the fringe of the tropics (compared to the neverchanging heat nearer the equator), especially in the knowledge that we’ll sod off this year before the really nasty cold weather sets in Until then we’ll enjoy autumn here

Yesterday we took our last things back from the house, harvested more bananas and lemons and invited our neighbours over for a ‘housecooling-party’. We cooked a typically Austrian meal so for the probably first time ever a Styrian Kaeferbohnen-Salat (salad of big red beans) with pumpkinseed oil and Semmelknoedel (bread dumplings) were served on Taravai. We were a bit worried whether our polynesian friends would like that kind of exotic food, but even the kids dug in

After finishing all our planned boat projects (varnishing inside, painting the cockpit, etc.) we’ve moved back to the boat. Running water, a toilet in the bathroom, no bugs in the living room, no rats on the roof – boat life’s pure luxury We’ll miss our little house and the garden though, especially our goatie. We spoiled her quite a bit, feeding her carrots and bananas and tying her to a different tree whenever she got bored.
We’re now enjoying some holidays, go snorkeling on the reefs and are looking forward to exploring the few corners of the Gambier that we still haven’t seen.

Now that we’ve basically finished the jobs on Pitufa we’ve got time again to enjoy ‘our’ little island. Recently tourist groups from the two pensions on Mangareva have started visiting Taravai and last week our neighbour Herve led some up to the peak behind the village. As there’s no paths into the mountains we asked him for directions yesterday and started hiking up the same mountain. Of course we lost the track he’d made soon, but the basic direction (up!) was clear and we found a crisscross of little paths–as these are made by and for goats they were helpful, but sometimes not quite high enough for human hikers. After an hour of crawling under branches, climbing over rocks and making tunnels through the reed we reached the ridge of the mountain and were rewarded with a wonderful view all over the island and most of the archipelago. When we sat down for a picknick of bananas some curious goats came along, apparently we were sitting right on their highway

Yesterday our neighbour Herve showed us the ruins of the old church and its cemetery in the forest behind his house. An overgrown stone road leads up the mountain to the site where only one wall of the first church and a huge cross of the cemetery remain. Those were built by the people soon after the arrival of the missionaries in 1860. A landslide has destroyed the church and covered the cemetery and Herve wasn’t sure about the date when this site was abandoned and a new church built on the shore, but he knows that his great-grandfather lies buried there.
He told us that in the 19th century 2000 people lived on little Taravai. Roads led over the ridge and there were villages in the bays of Onemea and Anganui on the western side. At this time the island was completely deforested, only in the last few decades trees were planted. The pines, acacias and other introduced species thrived in the fertile soil and today Taravai is covered by dense forest again. Unlike the trees the people didn’t return. Nowadays only 10 people live on the island–soon the population will decrease to 8 again, because we’ve almost finished our boat projects and will shortly move back on Pifufa.

At the beginning of this week we sailed to Rikitea in order to get some things done in the big city (post office, etc.). Our elderly outboard engine had been a nuisance for quite a while (first the choke rod ripped off, then the carburettor got clogged, then the drive pin broke, etc.) and on Monday the gear lever broke off (since the axis of the lever had got stuck in the corroded housing): rien ne va plus. As we rely heavily on our main means of local transport (rowing the bulky dinghy’s not very efficient) we were desperate–the repair exceeded our resources on board as well as the know-how of our board technician. Fortunately the neighbouring cruiser in the anchorage turned our to be a professional mechanic. He agreed to take on our problem despite of a full schedule (it seems there’s no mechanic in the Gambier so rows of broken cars and mopeds are queuing). Christian was able to look over his shoulder thus getting a much deeper understanding of the needs of our little 3.5-hp 4-stroke Mariner.

As the Mariner’s already quite old and nobody can predict what’s going to fall off next (it seems to us, 6 years are the design life expectancy), we used the chance to buy a barely-used outboard that cruiser friends had for sale. Of course we then needed another mounting on the railing for the 9,8 hp 2-stroke Tohatsu, which meant another day of work with basically all our power tools and required all the gear that lived already on the railing to swap places.

This morning we got back to Taravai and enjoyed a lazy day, just snorkelling and reading. Tomorrow we’ll get rested and energetically back to work between boat and house.

By now we’ve established a daily routine: we spend the nights in the house, have an early breakfast (with fresh baguettes, because the only electric equipment the house offers is a gigantic freezer powered by solar panels, hurray!) and spend the mornings varnishing on Pitufa.
At noon we come back ashore and do some gardening, cleaning, etc. around the house.

Life ashore is taking its toll:
We both had some digestion problems (probably because we used the rainwater collected via the roof for cooking) and believe me, diarrhea is double fun when it means stumbling into the woods in the dark of the night equipped with toilet paper and a shovel…

A few days later I discovered the hard way that wellies are not the proper footgear for rock climbing and ended up with quite a bloody knee. Before rushing off to get first aid on Pitufa I happened to discover an outhouse in the undergrowth of the neighbouring plot. The stonehouse there is totally derelict, but the privy’s in a good enough condition. Thus I solved the above mentioned problem.

One bloody leg in the family wasn’t enough, lawn mowing also turned out to be a risky business. While mowing over a stony area Christian’s leg got hit by a stone ejected with bullet speed from the mower.
Fortunately Leeloo has fared better: afraid of most landbased creatures, she successfully avoids risks. In order to make her life more interesting I persuaded her to climb the hill right behind the house this afternoon. It’s an incredibly steep, crumbly slope up through the undergrowth, but we made it almost up to the ridge with Leeloo leading the way like a mountain goat (very surprising). The way down was harder than up, we got slightly lost and in the end I slid down most of the way on my bum, dragging along a protesting Leeloo

When we saw that the grib file predicted winds of up to 30 knots for the weekend we already expected quite a breeze, but the squalls that moved every two hours over Pitufa brought gusts of 50 knots. We could clearly see the gusts approaching as high banks of whipped up spray, as soon as they reached the boat she was whirled around and pushed to the side with the wind rattling the superstructures. Once the windmeter went up to 60–the highest we’ve ever seen.
Pitufa endured the gusts steadily, the anchor held, nothing got blown away. At some point the wind generator stopped working though (I know we should have secured the poor guy). Fortunately it turned out to be ok, but a transistor in its controller had got fried.

Tomorrow the weather should return to normal, and we’ll return to our tasks ashore and aboard.

Last week has been crazy-busy-exhausting here. We have two building sites going on at the same time: Getting the house into a truly good shape would take lots of time (maybe burning it down and building a new one would be the easiest ), so we decided to get the house in a state well enough to sleep in it (killing spiders, cockroaches, shying away rats, cleaning the worst muck, etc.) – still lots of work but feasible. We’re not planning on staying long enough to really, really care. We see it more like being on camping holidays.

Parallel to that we’ve started our second building site in order not to get bored… We started sanding and varnishing worn down woodwork on Pitufa (companionway, handrails, ladder, rough surfaces on walls and doors, etc.) bit by bit. We can’t take things ashore to work on them like we thought we would, because the house is infested by termites and other little bugs that we don’t want to carry back on precious Pitufa. Therefore we have to be really strict: clothes can’t come back aboard before they’re washed, everything else goes in plastic containers, and usually we take just what we need for the next meal (takes lots of thinking ahead and involves plenty of shit-I-forgot experiences

The weather forecast predicted strong winds for the weekend, so we’ve moved back on Pitufa and are having a relaxed break. It’s so nice to be back aboard. Now we really appreciate how cozy, clean and bug-free our little home is.
Leeloo also seems happy to be back home, where all the sounds and smells (except the varnish) are familiar and no scary creatures like chicken, goats and rats are lurking. At the moment she’s peacefully sleeping under the sprayhood, despite the fact that the wind is howling over Pitufa with 30 knots, rattling all superstructures

Remember how we always raved over the cute, mostly empty village on Taravai? Well, now there’s four inhabited houses on Taravai instead of three. After waving goodbye to Birgit’s Mom on the tiny airport yesterday noon, we sailed to the village anchorage and took inventory of our new little land base for the next few months. To be honest it’s more a hut than a house, and we found it already populated by 5000 thousand house spiders (daddy long legs version), 2 puppy sized cockroaches (cocky and roachy seemede as shocked to see humans as we were to see them), a spider the size of a plate (mind you, not a dessert plate), an unknown number of rats (we just found impressively sized droppings and two abondoned nests in the dirty laundry the owners left in the cupboard), 200 geckos, 2 goats, a few hens with little chicks and of course 4 million mosquitoes. In two days of hard work we mowed the kneehigh grass (after repairing the dodgy mower that was apparently the first step to get rid of mosquitoes), raked the leaves into 10 heaps (to be burned, another step against mosquitoes), cleaned the roof in order to get clean water into the tank and swept the house (now there’s 4000 thousand spiders less). We’re happy to keep the geckos, chicken and goats, the rest will hopefully be persuaded to move on. Now we’re back home on Pitufa, feeling quite exhausted, but also satisfied with the quick progress of the work. Soon the house will be ready to move in. It’s been a while since we did things like mowing a lawn… +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Wisst ihr noch, wie wir immer vom suessen, fast leeren Dorf auf Taravai geschwaermt haben? Jetzt gibt’s statt drei schon vier bewohnte Haeuser hier. Nachdem wir Birgit’s Mom am winzigen Flughafen verabschiedet hatten, segelten wir gestern Mittag zur Dorfanchorage auf Taravai und machten eine Bestandsaufnahme unserer neuen, kleinen Landbasis fuer die naechsten paar Monate. Ehrlich gesagt ist es eher eine Huette als ein Haus und ausserdem fanden wir es bereits ziemlich bevoelkert vor: 5000 Hausspinnen (Weberknechtvariante), zwei Kuechenschaben so gross wie kleine Hunde (Cocky und Roachy schienen ebenso von unserem Anblick geschockt wie wir von ihrem), eine tellergrosse Spinne (wohlgemerkt kein Dessertteller), eine unbekannte Zahl Ratten (wir fanden Bemmerl in beeindruckender Groesse und zwei verlassene Nester in der schmutzigen Waesche, die die Eigner im Kasten hinterliessen), 200 Geckos, 2 Ziegen, einige Hennen mit Winzkueken und natuerlich 4 Millionen Moskitos. In zwei Tagen harter Arbeit haben wir das kniehohe Gras gemaeht (erst musste der marode Rasenmaeher repariert werden, dann folgte der erste Schlag gegen die Moskitos), rechten das Laub in 10 zu verbrennende Haufen (auch gut gegen Moskitos), putzten das Dach um irgendwann sauberes Wasser in den Tank sammeln zu koennen, kehrten das Haus (jetzt sind 4000 Spinnen weniger). Wir behalten gern die Geckos, Hennen und Ziegen, der Rest wird sich hoffentlich zum Umzug ueberreden lassen. Jetzt sind wir zurueck daheim auf Pitufa, ziemlich fertig, aber auch zufrieden mit dem Fortschritt der Arbeit. Bald koennen wir in das Haeuschen einziehen. Es ist schon eine Weile her, seit wir das letzte Mal einen Rasen gemaeht haben…

We’ve sailed back to the little motu Tauna to enjoy some more swimming, snorkeling, diving and beach walking (the shells here are just irresistable ) Birgit’s mom’s enjoying her last few days here, the flight back’s going to be long and strenuous (Gambier-Tahiti-L.A.-Paris-Vienna…) Despite the warm weather a virus is going around bringing joint ache, fever, a sore throat and a runny nose to its victims. Birgit had it last week, now it’s Christian’s turn. First we were worried that it was something serious (the symptoms remind of dengue or zika), but fortunately it lasts only 3 days…

There’s only one house on the little island Agakauitai right next to Taravai. Last time we were there only the three little piggies lived there. We were quite surprised to find additional 7 piglets this time. Yesterday we saw from the boat as the whole family took off for a walk on the beach. Quickly we raced there by dinghy. Instead of disappearing into the undergrowth the whole bunch greeted us excitedly and walked further along the beach together with us In German the expression ‘to have pig’ means the same as having luck. With that many pigs we can only be very lucky in 2014!