September 2011 2011

Hello everyone,

Hello from the Leeward Islands
Francette has returned to France with the result of our work in the recent months : our new film about the islands in the Indian Ocean, the new book dedicated to animals... and numerous other projects ; it's time for me to tackle the maintenance of Banana Split, tomorrow morning it leaves the water at the shipyard, and I will endeavour to repaint the hull and bridge. To make non-skid paint, I went to pick up 30 pounds of fine sand on a beach in Huahine ... I have already removed the water tanks to check the condition of the hull below (all OK) and made two naked tiny cracks that were created under the deck for soldering.

On the road to the Leeward islands, I still took time to find an atoll that I did not know yet, Raraka, beautiful and quiet, with a pass that?s a bit rough, and about sixty very welcoming people; a few days before my visit, a small sailboat that had from Alaska, Kayak, ran aground on the reef. The crew probably fell asleep ... Yes, even with the extraordinary progress of GPS, navigation in the Tuamotus retains an element of risk. The crew abandoned the boat, as the reef is much too wide to carry the boat across reef to the deep water of the lagoon. A beautiful dream that ends in a few seconds, which must have been particularly shocking, at night, amid the breaking waves...

A unhappy boat, a happy boat: a very warm meeting: on his catamaran Nusa Dua lives Pierre Cosso, a French actor revealed by a huge French blockbuster of twenty years ago, La Boum! He has bee sailing for several years, and will occasionally take part in a shooting in Italy for a series broadcast by Canale Cinque ; they have settled on board their boat with his wife Rautea in the lagoon of Huahine, my favorite island in the Leeward islands, so that his son can go to school in the village of Fare...