MARCH 2012

Hello everyone,

Rain over the Marquesas?

February has been successively cold, frenetic, and exotic: The last two weeks of our tour took place with polar temperatures: fifteen Celsius below zero for ten days in Touraine, in the Perche and Beauce. This has not prevented the public to come and escape with us two hours to New Caledonia: 68 lectures this winter, close to 20,000 spectators ...

Great news on this monthly letter : you can now click on the photos to enlarge them...

In the week following the end of the tour, I returned to the recording studio the studio, or rather French singer Stanislas? home studio, to record the voices of ... 18 new songs! Fifteen of them should appear in September on a new album, the first since the one I ha recorded in 1987 ...! Most songs were written by Stanislas and a team of young writers and composers, and some by me ... Sorry, but you must wait until September to find out ... If I can publish a preview I will do as soon as possible...

And then, after staying a little longer than usual in Europe, we took the Air Tahiti Nui plane, escorted by a French TV filming crew, who has followed us throughout the journey , all the way to the Marquesas. One more hectic day in Papeete to ship boxes of supplies on the small cargo ship, the Aranui, and Air Tahiti?s ATR has brought us to the small airport to Terre Deserte Airport (deserted Land, a promising name!) , in Nuku Hiva, where Arnaud, his wife and their two children were waiting to us back the keys to the boat, after three and a half months of navigation through the Marquesas and Gambier. All that was left was to cross the rough road leading to the Bay of Taiohae, where Banana Split had been waiting for us quietly, tossed on the gentle swells which are a characteristic of almost all Marchesan anchorage spots.

The French TV crew accompanied us to the three bays of Hatiheu, Akapaa and Hakaui, taking time to shoot footage that will also appear in a 26 minutes film(begun in 2005) dedicated to the Marquesas, complementing the range of 6 French Polynesian archipelagos: Windward Island, Leeward Islands, Austral, Tuamotu, Gambier, and, as stated, the Marquesas.?We await the arrival today of the Ara Nui with our supplies, and we?ll sail for a few weeks around the Marquesas Islands, Then we will probably take a flight to Japan to finish the filming begun three years ago and interrupted by the events of Fukushima..
Happy March to all !

Antoine