Papeete, Tahiti

Everyone says "Get in, get out", there's nothing special about Papeete, the capital of Tahiti and hub of French Polynesia. At first, Lo disagreed as she was pretty excited to visit cafes for tea with real milk, find ice cream, fresh baguettes and pain au chocolat. But after two weeks tied to the dock so we could do some key repairs, with the traffic so close by, the novelty quickly wore off. Every night, we'd watch the picturesque sunset behind Moorea 20 miles away and think of the clean, clear water, swimming and snorkeling we were missing. But alas, the computers, windlass and bollard needed repairs.

As we wrote before, BOTH computers were down with hard drive issues. Gary bought new ones for the rebuilds and tried to salvage our data from the old ones. GARY vs. BILL...CAGE MATCH...last one standing takes all. With Gary getting tossed around and whimpering like a 90-lbs weakling for a couple of days, it looked like Bill Gates would easily take the victory. Bill moved effortlessly from supplex to sleeper, nearly knocking Gary out on numerous occasions. Just when everyone thought he could take no more abuse, Gary accessed the old Dell's hard drive and saved all the emails, allowing him to finish rebuilding the old Dell with the new hard drive. The new Dell, while backed up COMPLETELY on an external drive, was not cooperating and in the end they called the match a draw. We also found that we had backed up all but a weeks worth of photos on the external drive, so we were quite happy in the end. The windlass and bollard repairs went relatively smoothly, which is surprizing for Papeete.

The real kicker for getting out of Papeete came when one of our cruising friends tied to the dock just opposite us was robbed while she was sleeping onboard, losing everything electronic from laptops to her cell phone. The thief also took Lo's camel pack from our boat, but luckily mustn't have been impressed to find the weight to be due to a full bladder of WATER and ditched it on the pier. We were really happy to head to the nice anchorage south of Papeete, where we met up with friends for a couple of nights before heading over to Moorea.