March 2011 2011

Hello everyone,

Hello everybody

After a four-week stay in our favorite deserted island, our supplies running low, we felt tempted to sail towards a nearby atoll, which boasts... a small supermarket receiving once a week from Tahiti fresh fruit and vegetables, a rare and precious thing in the Tuamotus. However, this year, the trade winds are very stable, and do not help sailing eastward... Banana Split was beating pretty violently into the steep waves, when I went down into the port hull... and found it full of sea water, up to above the floorboards: two tiny bits of metal, the"pop" rivets that hold one of the locks of an emergency hatch (a requirement in France for catamarans) had broken down, and a true Niagara was pouring into the boat at each wave... Half a ton of salt water inside the boat! And in these occurrences, there's always a problem with the bilge pumps. We turned around, and sailed back downwind towards a shelter were I was able to repair the hatch and bail out the boat. Then, two days later, with a better weather forecast, we were able to sail to Makemo, where we rinsed everything with one cubic meter of rain water, and were we could at last do our provisioning... and also, in the island's small restaurant, watch the show of a very popular singer in Polynesia, Rocky Gobrait, who sings, among others... Elvis Presley's songs... An amusing encounter on an atoll at the end of the Tuamotus.

Then we returned to the anchoring spots of our favorite lagoon, with a small stop by an island that was teeming with birds, masked boobies, brown boobies, and a strange, small bird called in French ?Chevalier errant?, that likes to walk the beaches, keeping a short distance away from us, but that at an unknown signal, suddenly takes off and fly all the way to Alaska. We were also able to film a baby fairy tern, all covered with down. Coral reefs were as spectacular underwater, alive with their bright colors, as when they are dead, turned into rocks thrown onto the shores by storms. No news yet of the numerous turtle eggs that are hatching under the beaches' sand.
An here we are, in about three weeks, we'll head back to Tahiti to fly to Japan to complete the shooting of our documentary (our next "letter of the month" should be sent from there), and to fly back to France to finish our next films and apps for the Ipad. We'll be present at Paris' Book show only by means of a short video we have just shot, presenting our very exotic graphic studio on board Banana Split. (It's in French but not very hard to understand).

watch the video !


In the meantime, bye for now

Antoine