Toau
Anse Amyot
On the social front, we have both our fellow cruisers come for tea… how very British, AA made beautiful scones and Ian baked a cake . We do spend a bit of time with Valentine and Gaston on shore, every time we go for a walk. I even spend a rainy afternoon playing with pearls and other stuff making necklaces with her. Loads of chatting and sharing and bartering for a necklace and pearls . Ian bonds with Gaston over the outboard, the propeller was not turning properly, they had to replace the whole lot. Fortunately, we had spares for this. We also prepare for the coming blow, anchor is out as a back up if the mooring give up, all on deck is tied up and secured, we even switch of the wiz, wind generator, so it does not blow up. Actually this has been brilliant for the batteries and laptop charged, we have had Versailles in there… all lights blazing and unlimited amount of laptop use.
The big wind is here now…. For 3 days we have had constant winds of 25 with peaks at 30 knots… yesterday we had a brief lull with no wind at all but rain, definitely the calm before the storm… the wind steadily increased over the course of the day , by 4 pm we are back to the 30 knots, by 6 we are now a steady mid 30’s by 8pm we are in the 40’s . We watch movies to get our mind off it but the wind is really howling out there, we have to have the volume full blast. Small mercy, because we are just behind the reef, quite close to it, we are really steady, no rocking, rolling or pitching at all. If you put your headphone on and listen to music you do not actually realize how bad the weather is.
Hopefully this won’t last for much longer, although the forecast is predicting another 3 days of it with waves of up to 4 m outside the atolls. Not good. The sad thing is we won’t be able to visit another atoll. We are now running out of time in the Tuamotus, we’ll have to make a dash to Tahiti direct when we leave here… too many days pinned down to a place by the weather.
