The last week has been frustrating for the 15-18 boats bottled up at Anse Amyot--waiting first for some wind, and then waiting for the wind to stop blowing. We went from literally zero wind to 25-30 knots within a few hours last Saturday as a cold front swept in, and it has been blowing like stink since then, until late yesterday.
Before the wind started blowing, we took advantage of the calm conditions to do a lot of diving. We made at least one dive a day, and on the really calm days, two dives. We explored along the wall further in both directions--finding a few more neat dive spots. We usually had an entourage of several dinghies following us--some new friends. One a diver, and another couple were avid snorkelers. It was nice sharing our favorite dive spots with everyone, and it's always safer having at least one extra dinghy along when going outside the atoll (it's a long drift to Tahiti!!).
Once the wind started blowing, we mostly stayed on the boat and caught up on chores. I finally got the courage to upgrade the hard drive in my laptop. I had bought the drive back in February, but never had the time while we were in Hawaii to get it installed. Our friend Gene on Reflections, on a mooring with us at Toau, gave me the encouragement I needed, and also loaned me his drive enclosure and a disk cloning program. That made the job really easy.
Dave did Preventive Maintenance on the dive compressor, and also lots of other similar chores around the boat. Together we spent one whole afternoon removing and re-bedding the port genoa track--which leaked like a sieve on our way down from Hawaii.
In addition to the boat chores, we enjoyed socializing around the small fleet. We had several happy hours ashore, as well as other social gatherings for important functions like burning trash and swapping books.
Today when the weather finally calmed down, Anse Amyot emptied out. 14 boats scattered to the wind--3 went south to Fakarava, 1 went north to Apataki, and the rest headed west for Tahiti. We were the last of a group of 4 boats who left around 3pm today. Everyone is joking about having to keep a proper watch on this trip, because so many boats are headed for Tahiti right now.
Anyway, all is well. We are looking forward to getting to Tahiti and checking out the big grocery store we have heard about. We are almost out of bread, and are down to our last tomato.
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At 6/12/2011 7:50 AM (utc) our position was 16°05.37'S 146°43.16'W
http://svsoggypaws.com/currentposition.htm
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