Day 86: Tahuata, Marquesas – 01/04/10

We wake up quite early.  Like us, probably most people in the anchorage are thinking about the poor lad last night.  We find out by radio that he is being flown to Tahiti today to the hospital so that they can deal with the stump – he has definitely lost the finger.  At least it was not on his dominant hand.

Peter from Asolare comes on the VHF asking for Paul.  We tell him that he is still on Hiva Oa and Peter says he has received an e-mail from WCC saying that we should all take our WARC rally flags down as the French Customs and Immigration are cruising the Marquesas wanting to fine us for not having some ridiculous piece of paperwork filled out correctly.  Half the fleet in the anchorage are rushing to take down their flags when some bright spark casually announces that today is 1 April.  We are all caught!  Thanks Peter.

I decide to clean the hulls of the boat but this ends up being a lot tougher than I thought.  To prevent myself burning in the water, I do the hull under the boat as then I am in the shade.  However, when Paul did one yesterday, the sea was lovely and calm.  Today, the sea is not as helpful.  I put on my buoyancy aid and get in armed with a scrubbing pad and the hand clamp to help keep me in one place.  Try as I might to get the clamp onto the side of the boat, each time I exert enough pressure to get it to stick, I push myself away from the boat and lose the pressure again.  Eventually I give up with it and just hang from the dinghy line, scrubbing like mad.  However, the dinghy line only lets me clean about five feet of hull.  Mike rigs me up another line from the front of the boat so that I can cling to it and stop myself floating away as the current is very strong.  The wind is also very strong and at times the boat shoots away from me and the next minute it hurtles towards me and I have to shove my arm out to hold myself away, kicking like mad so that my legs don’t go beneath the hull and damage the antifouling.  All very exhausting but very good exercise. 

Mike gets into the water to practise with his hooka gear.  This is a very strange machine which sounds like a vacuum cleaner (in fact I thought he was doing housework when he first turned it on – no such luck) and is attached to a hose which pumps air down to his breathing apparatus.  It allows him to get below the boat and work on it if he needs to for a long period of time.

When I get round to the stern port side, there are loads of tiny red crabs hanging onto the side in the algae.  As I scrub, they drop off into the water and I am terrified that they will get down my buoyancy aid.  I don’t know what I think they will actually be able to do to me but I just don’t like the idea.  Eventually I am too tired to do anymore but the underside is now done, and all the long, green beard has been removed from the outside of both hulls so Jeannius looks a hell of a lot better than she did.

We have an afternoon sleep, more justified than most days as we are so tired.  Late in the afternoon we have a ride around the bay in the dinghy, taking photos and looking at where there might be good snorkelling on a less breezy day.

Photos:  Views of the beach and bay on Tahuata

When we get back to Jeannius, I lie down in the dinghy and attempt to scrub the remaining hulls while Mike attempts to keep the dinghy against the hull using the outboard motor.  From afar, it must look a ridiculous sight.  The sun disappears over the horizon while we are doing this – while other people are sitting in their cockpits having sundowners, I am dangling over the side of a dinghy with a scrubbing brush in hand.  Something is wrong here, but at least I will sleep well tonight.