Tuesday 7th August

Opunahu bay,
Moorea

17 29.318 S
149 51.059 W

The water was flat calm first thing this morning so Gerry decided that today was the day for going up the mast to fix the anchor light and replace the spinnaker halyard. Abigail and I manned the winch and Gerry squashed himself into the bosun’s chair. It was a great deal easier to hoist him up the mast with the 2 of us taking turns at the winch and soon he was threading the trace down through the mast with the new halyard attached to it (after managing to drop the new halyard once and causing us to have to find some way to get it back up the mast to him). Abigail climbed on to the boom to hook the trace through the right exit point and we managed to pull the new halyard through and tie it off. Then it was another few feet up the mast so that he could change the bulb at the anchor light. At last all the replacements were done and we reluctantly let him back down again. Of course it was stinking hot by now and we had all caught the sun a little. We though that we were going to be able to go for a swim next, oh no, Gerry wanted to get the stitching done on the jib (it had come apart along the sacrificial edging about half way up). Out came the heavy duty sewing machine onto the foredeck, down came the jib and then the cursing and swearing began as the thread kept breaking, the tension kept going wrong and the sail was difficult to get underneath the foot to stitch. One broken needle and about a million yards of thread later I had managed to do a repair job that was just acceptable. Abigail went off for a swim whilst Gerry and I struggled with the sail but she was back onboard in time to help us put it back up and furl it away again.
Once we had the sail away we debated whether we wanted to move to the next bay around, as we had snorkelled the reef in Cooks bay and there was supposed to be internet available in Opunahu bay we decided to move around there and see if there was. We hauled the anchor in and motored the 5 miles around, dropping our anchor amongst the dozen or so boats already there. We ended up re anchoring twice as Gerry wasn’t happy with how close we got to other boats when the wind changed direction. Abigail took herself off for an afternoon nap whilst Gerry and I went for a dink around the shore line – lots of coral heads dot the shoreline and although they are marked by channel markers we still managed to hit the top of one of them, luckily there was no damage done but we took a very wide path back to the boat. I spent the rest of the afternoon cooking up a curry and making up kebabs for dinner. The last of our bananas were soft and squashy by now so when Abigail got up we threw together a couple of banana loaves. Gerry bar b qued for the second night in a row, I guess we will be cleaning the bar b que out tomorrow as he didn’t do it after using it. We had all caught the sun today to various degrees and the Aloe Vera was applied to areas of red skin quite liberally before going to bed.