Joyeuses Paques!

La Orana! 

This will be a quick update this week as Duncan "the mule" arrived this morning!! The little plane to Raiatea touched down at 9.25am – the last of 4 flights after an epic 34h journey. We were outside on the tarmac as the plane drew up so it was pretty special watching him appear down those steps looking, I have to say, A LOT fresher than we did 12 weeks ago! 

Duncan off the plane!

Water Taxis at the airport

A quick taxi ride back to the marina and by 10am we were showing him around Papillon. We had decided the pickup would be easier from the marina so had come back in for a couple of nights yesterday. His two huge bags of luggage, which mostly contained boat gear for us, were more easily transported into Papillon from a dock than a moving dinghy! Tomorrow we will be on our way though. The shopping is done, the clothes are washed, water tanks filled and the decks scrubbed. We are ready for the off. All our efforts the last couple of weeks have paid off. There were times when it looked unlikely that we would ever be ready to go back out to sea again but I think we are there. The biggest excitement was getting the alternator working again so that the engines were charging the domestic as well as the starter batteries. I know it doesn’t sound very exciting news but in the absence of sunshine (more later) we have no solar charging up our batteries so it’s vital that the engines can take over. The problem has been long running – starting virtually the day we arrived - so has been quite a painful one, but between the skipper and a fistful of electricians I think it has been solved. One thing is for sure – we are considerably more knowledgeable about the idiosyncrasies of Papillon’s wiring now so maybe all the pain has ultimately been a good thing.

Having a working alternator let us try out our “Rainman” water maker for the first time last week. This has been our biggest purchase so far so it felt quite a big deal getting it up and running. The You Tube Videos were all correct though – it is incredibly straightforward. The seawater gets sucked up through a 5uM filter, high pressure is then applied to the stream and by reverse osmosis pure water is separated from brine and collected into our water tanks at approximately 30l/hr. Watching the water running out of the white hose into our freshwater tank and the brine running back into the sea out of the green hose felt like a little miracle. We were so excited. Longer passages have suddenly become a lot more possible. 

Fresh water flowing into the tank

And then the weather turned

 

Having the water maker working meant we didn’t have to come into Uturoa over the weekend to fill up the tanks. And thank goodness for that because the wind and rain were biblical at times. The mooring we are on in the lagoon is a good strong one but at times the mooring ball completely disappeared under the surface we were pulling so hard against it. We had two back up ropes on the mooring , anchor watch permanently on and were out checking everything with every squall. It was really wild – so a very different Easter Weekend from the photos we kept receiving from home! 

And the rain came down

Unrelenting

Fortunately, I had brought a tiny packet of Easter eggs from the UK to celebrate. All the ones in Champion had melted on the shelf when I had looked earlier in the week! The chocolate bunnies were particularly grotesque so not very appetising, and I passed on all of them. Skipper had mentioned an Easter egg hunt but when he saw the pitiful collection it hardly seemed worth it! We had them after our roast chicken ( pushing the boat out for Easter on the dining front!). They were our first chocolate for 12 weeks and absolutely delicious!