Day 93: Hiva Oa, Marquesas – 08/04/10

When we wake up it almost feels cool for some reason.  Mike gets up to check the temperature and it’s only 26 degrees.  Only! 

We decide to make full use of the internet here and spend all morning catching up with stuff – we will probably get internet on Nuku Hiva then that will be it until we get to Tahiti at the end of the month.  I can’t believe it when I eventually surface and discover that it is gone noon and Jessea, the lovely Privilege, has left.

I make a loaf of garlic bread and we sit and eat it with some of the Lebanese spice mix that Sara gave me mixed with olive oil.  We watch the comings and goings in the bay.  A large white ship arrives which looks incongruous in this setting - apparently it is a cargo ship that also carries about 150 passengers.  I don’t know where they all go as they disembark but an extra 150 people in one go is a lot for a tiny place like this.

Photo:  The huge ship seems to take up half the bay!

There are a lot of serious live-aboard boats here in this bay.  These people are incredible.  Like nomads of the sea, many of them function with no watermakers, freezers or complex electronics.  The boats tend to be small with as little automation as possible so less can go wrong, and many of them have children.  We watch these little boat rats handle dilapidated dinghies, baling them out as they come to shore and tie up, putting me to shame, and they look happy, healthy and act older than their years.  Last night I watched one such blonde, naked cherub come ashore with it’s dreadlocked father.  This child could not have been more than three years old.  It leaped out of the dinghy and helped tie up, then scampered, incredibly surefooted, up the concrete steps and across the stone and grit waste ground without a care in the world.  I would have been walking across moaning about the stones hurting my feet.  The only time it actually acted like a small child was when it was forced to stand under the tap to be washed – then it wailed.  When they went back to the dinghy, it had the presence of mind to pick up something that its father had left behind – it actually noticed!  Watching these children, I wonder who has got the parenting right – these nomads of the sea, or us.

A couple of glasses of wine send Mike and I to sleep in the late afternoon and we don’t wake up until it’s dark so it ends up being a realy lazy day.  We intend getting up really early tomorrow to head for Ua Pou, 60 miles away, but when Mike downloads the weather forecast, he finds out that the winds are going to be so light that we wouldn’t make it.  Instead we will leave about midday and sail overnight, arriving there Saturday morning.