July 2013

Hello everyone,

Who said only idiots never change their minds?

Once again, after a month, I find myself in a very different place from the one I had planned to be in ...


On June 1, with my eldest son Manea, who had left for two weeks his business (creating apps for the iPhone and IPad, beautiful enriched books), we left the shelter of Tahaa's lagoon while the weather forecast announced a South swell 4 to 5 meters high , but it did not bother us anymore when we reached the high seas. Our destination: the Cook Islands; after four days of perfect crossing, albeit a little rough, we reached the port of Rarotonga and anchored Banana Split a few meters away from a superb legendary sailboat, the Picton Castle. For a week I witnessed the preparations for departure of this tall ship based in Nova Scotia, but registered in the Cook Islands a sail training ship, It's in its third round the world journey, and it had settled for a few months in its home port of Avatiu to help service the remote atolls of the Northern Cooks.
Manea left for France on the weekly Air Tahiti flight, the Picton Castle sailed, and then I found myself facing a major choice to make : sailing westward, as I had more or less planned, strongly tempted me, but leaving French Polynesia, especially the Tuamotus, seems harder every year ... '

In these cases - this is one of my few superstitions - I look for what I call "signs from heaven" ... and this time, I got a decisive one : For the whole next week the weather reports forecasted no easterlies ( the trade winds that could take me to Tonga), but a period of calm and light winds perfect for carrying me back to the Society Islands ... and this is how after another smooth crossing, I saw once again, rising on the horizon, the mountains of Tahiti.

And it was a welcome stopover, because it was just when I was thinking of continuing straightaway towards our favorite lagoons in the Tuamotus that a series of gremlins manifested themselves aboard Banana Split : nothing serious, but suddenly no more autopilot, and an alternator out of service ... You may say I'm lucky, two friends, Richard and Patrick, who are specialists in these two fields, were anchored in the lagoon of Punaauia, and easily put it all in order.
At Arue's Yacht Club I also found my old boat, Voyage, that had recently changed owners (all the same the man I sold it to to has sailed it for 23 years !). And as a third boat built by the same shipyard, Prometa (then installed in the small city of Tarare, near Lyons, in France) was anchored a few hundred meters away, we brought together for a while four brightly painted aluminium hulls, all of them shaped in the mountains surounding Lyons, and formed a yellow and green "tetramaran ".