One of our faithful readers, Elan Caspi who sailed down to Mexico with us on the Ha Ha last Fall and who has himself sailed to the Marquesas noted that I goofed on the Lat/Lon the other night (thanks Elan!). The correct Latitude/Longitude for our current location is as follows:
21 degrees, 12 minutes, 17 seconds south; 159 degrees, 47 minutes 07 seconds west
I accidentally transposed the seconds into the minutes.
One of our neighbors
We’re here and there’s nothing broken for now. Ann went to church today and was thrilled to have experienced her first mass in about 8 months that was given in ENGLISH! She enjoyed hearing the prayers and singing the hymns in English. While Ann was in church, I went down to the scooter rental place to get a scooter since it looks like we’re going to stay here for a week and explore the island. The place was technically closed-the Cook Islanders take their Sundays very seriously-but there was someone there who took my reservation for a scooter and I’ll pick it up Monday morning at 0800. $20/day is a good deal for such fun transportation! The only hang-up is I’ll have to take a motorcycle test (even though we had a scooter for three days on Aitutaki) and we have to go the Rarotonga Police Department to get a local driver’s license. Should be fun!
The rest of today was just reading our books and we went for a couple mile long walk just to get off the boat and stretch our legs. When we came back, Ann was talking to our boat neighbors and found out they had a key to the showers and unabashedly asked to borrow it (the harbor master has been closed all weekend since we got here and we can’t get our own key until Monday/tomorrow). Score! We got it and both of us enjoyed the first real shower in a while.
The other fun thing: people love to come down to the wharf and look at the boats. Since we’re Med-moored, our cockpit is facing the wharf and thus looking right at the people who are in turn looking down at us! We have now started conversations with lots of people who have given us their names, email, etc and invited us to visit them. It’s the same in all the areas we visit. People are interested in our story as we are in theirs and we have sort of pre-arranged to meet folks in lands we have yet to visit. Most of the folks we have met are from NZ and are on vacation here in the Cooks, but some are local and have invited us to stop by their business or call them if we’re in their town.
Yesterday on the wharf we also witnessed a cultural event that you just don’t see in the US. There was a small ship here-an island freighter-that also took passengers. Mid-morning we noticed a lot of people starting to congregate. Many had rugs and other mattress type things and we suddenly realized this freighter was going to be more of a ferry and would be taking a ton of people. It all came together when we realized that the last week of so has been Constitution Day in the Cook Islands. A celebration of their independence (I think from Great Britain-they are now aligned with NZ). Anyway, a hundred or so people were getting on board for a three day passage back to one of several Northern Cook islands. It was like watching a cruise ship leave except that you realized that these passengers would be setting up their own mattresses in the hallways of the ship for the trip. No fancy staterooms, yet everyone was thrilled to be on board and heading home.
Tomorrow, once we have the scooter (assuming I can pass the scooter test), we’ll do a tour of the island.
Postion: 21 degrees, 12 minutes south; 159 degrees, 07 minutes west
Contrary to current beliefs, we are comfortably situated in Rarotonga.
There was a rumor going around that the harbor was closed due to dredging. They are in fact dredging, but the harbor is not closed. This is a beautiful island and in some respects we’re glad people are avoiding it this year because of the rumor. More for us. There are only a couple boats in here, so it is very uncrowded. We’re thinking we’ll stay a week. There’s lot to do here including renting a scooter, hiking across the island (and taking a bus back-the buses here have two designations; Clockwise and Anticlockwise. That’s it!) and snorkeling. Not to mention the great Saturday market. We browsed it today and will hit it more seriously next week. There are some nice carvings and black pearls to by had.
On the way here-as if there wasn’t enough adventure from getting out of Aitutaki-a bolt holding the alternator bracket broke. Yikes. More stuff I never planned to have to fix. Anyway, we were having lunch in the cockpit when I smelled burnt rubber. I’ve learned to investigate stuff like that right away and pulled the engine cover off. Right away I saw the fan belt was loose. I looked for why it was loose and found the alternator bracket hanging in the breeze. We shut down the engine right away and investigated further. Found the head of a bolt in the bilge. OK, looked at the engine, OH-there’s the rest of the bolt still in the engine itself. So, I drilled a pilot hole in the bolt and then put a bolt extractor in the drill and crossed fingers. It didn’t look like it was going to come out, but after some work,I finally got the stub of the broken bolt to come out. Now all we had to do was replace the bolt. Oops, special size, we don’t have any. So, bailing wire, some silicone glue and a undersized screw and we were able to affect a jury-rigged solution that got us into Rarotonga.
Oh, I forgot to mention that after our adventure getting out of Aitutaki, we had a spectacular sail down here to Raro. We finally got out of Aitutaki around 1530 and the rest of the day and all night had a glorious sail. But, come early afternoon the wind had dropped and unless we wanted to spend another night at sea, we needed to start the engine. So with four hours to go we started the engine and that’s when the broken part showed up.
The upshot of all this was that we had to come into Raro in the dark. Fortunately it’s very straightforward. You just pick up the range lights and come straight in. We did that, but looking at it today in the light, I’m impressed with how narrow it actually was. The other fortunate thing was Orcinius got in here in the afternoon and were waiting for us to show up, so we had a welcoming party who allowed us to just side tie to them instead of med-moor in the dark. (And Orcinius had already cleared it with the Port Captain so that we COULD come in – with limited space you need special approval.)So we did and that’s how we stayed the night. Today, we all had to clear the harbor for a couple hours to allow them to finish doing some dredging. After about an hour they signaled all was clear to come back in and we successfully med-moored to the harbor wall. Charisma did good.
I finished the day taking apart the bailing wire solution to the alternator bracket and putting in a new bolt of the correct size I was able to find at the local hardware store. It’s 5/16″ SS, about 4″ long. I will have to find the exact part which is a special hardened steel, but this will work until we’re able to find a place with the right parts. In mean time, we’re good to go.