On Plans, Changes and How We’re Feeling

On p lans, changes and how we’re feeling How we practised moving around and rescued a yacht along the way. Nuku Hiva, Marquesas Islands, Pacific Ocean. There’s this joke. Must be the ciguatera driving us to tell jokes for the second post in a row )). A fancy car is hurtling down a motorway at night. A bloke in a horse-drawn cart is crossing the road. Well, the car ploughs straight into the cart at full speed. The horse goes flying one way, the bloke and the cart the other. A guy gets out of the car with a pistol. He looks over and sees the horse thrashing around in its death throes in the ditch. A shot to the head puts it out of its misery. The bloke sees what the tough guy did to his horse and starts crawling towards the woods. The guy spots him: “Hey, mate, how are you?” “Even better than before the accident!” And the bloke bolts away on all fours as fast as he can. That’s how we’re feeling after the ciguatera—even better than before the accident, guys. We never did manage to move to the main village of the Marquesas on Nuku Hiva on the day we’d promised. We only managed it yesterday. It was the first day when the captain and I could both move around—raise the anchor, untie the buoys from the chain, hoist the sails, turn the winches. Fine, we can do it. The 25-mile passage went smoothly. At the entrance to the bay, we came bow to bow with our friends aboard Good Run. They had been trying to leave for the Tuamotus, but their engine had suddenly died, and the Brazilian-Czech-German crew was in distress, bobbing around in a patch of calm at the mouth of the bay. “Do you need help?” “Yes, please help us.” We took a long line, led it through a cleat to the stern winch, and entered the harbour with another yacht in tow. The guys dropped anchor for a few days to repair the engine. Our young sailor immediately spotted her French friend Azaï from the catamaran Azù in the bay and promptly started playing with her while her father Jérôme chatted with us in the cockpit. The Good Run crew brought us a bag of mangoes and took our young sailor for a walk ashore. Lada came back after eight o’clock with stories about how she had made a new friend from a Canadian yacht and how many things she had told her. The next morning, confirming our young sailor’s stories, her friend Coco Maria paid us a courtesy visit. We’re thinking of staying in Taiohae for about a week, stocking up on provisions and regaining our strength before setting off for the Tuamotus. We’ve already lost almost two weeks, but at least we’ve added another story to our list of tropical adventures :). Wishing everyone all the best!