Day 114: Tahiti – 29/04/10

Carole and John go off for the day on the WARC trip around Tahiti, leaving Mike waiting for an engineer to arrive and me to carry on with the mountain of washing.

The engineer arrives.  Mike calls me out of the cabin to translate but the words ‘circuit breaker’ were not ones that I learned at school so Mike reverts to pointing and gesticulating and I return to using Skype, where I continue berating everything to do with boats to Johanne on the other end of the line.  When I finish I find that the engineer and Mike appear to be in agreement over replacing the circuit breaker and the engineer goes off in an attempt to locate one.  He doesn’t seem very hopeful though.

While he is off ‘locating’, Mike decides to take the water maker pump apart and fit the new valves in the hope that the generator will eventually work.  He has to fight to get the pump out – it was supposed to be tightened to 10lbs ft of torque but he has to apply all of his weight to an 18 inch lever in order to get it to unscrew.  When he takes it apart and can see it spread out in the cockpit, he can see immediately why it has not been working – the plastic valve seals have melted and stuck in the valve springs preventing them from closing.  He replaces the valves, reassembles it and then the engineer comes back with the bad news that he has been unable to locate the right circuit breaker but he has come up with a cunning plan.  Yesterday, Dick from Tucanon gave us two ordinary circuit breakers in the hope that they would do the trick.  As they were, they didn’t.  However, the engineer manages to cobble something together to make them work, Mike switches on the generator, and hey presto – we have power!

He continues to work on the water maker and puts the pump back into the engine room, connects everything back together, and when he switches it on, it immediately starts to produce water – hurray.

While all this fixing has been going on, I am exploring the streets, and, let’s not deny it, the shops of Papeete.  I am still looking for a necklace of champagne coloured pearls as well as a pearl for Victoria and a necklace for Johanne.  She has ‘authorised’ me to shop on her behalf and given me a sum on money but there is so much choice it is bewildering.  There is shop after shop selling pearls of all qualities.  Some look decidedly of bad quality and some are really expensive.  There are so many variables that comparing from one shop to another is impossible and spending money for someone else when you have to use your own taste and judgement is daunting, but I attack the shops with vigour – at first.  The trouble is, so much of it looks the same. 

Photos:  Searching for pearls for someone else – HARD!

I trail around getting more and more punch drunk.  Then I find ‘Robles Pearls’.  At last, something different.  Their designs are amazing, mixing pearls with black onyx, lava stone, feathers, ribbons, net and leather.  I buy Victoria a beautiful pearl on a long leather thong and realise that there are quite a few things I would wear myself – if I decide not to have the more sedate champagne pearl necklace.  Mmm – decisions.

I visit the pearl market on my way back to the boat and they tell me that I need to go to Australia to get the champagne pearls which fits with what I have already been told.  I do see a couple of strings of champagne ones but the cheapest are imports from the Philippines and cost $4000 and the others are actually Tahiti pearls and cost $20,000.  I might be about to change my mind.

I trail back to the boat, tired and thirsty to be greeted by a triumphant Mike and all his successes.  I am so relieved, as, quite frankly, this morning I was more than a little pissed off with Jeannius.

Carole and John arrived back from their tour of the gardens and supermarkets of Tahiti.  Pardon?  Well, their tour was a little disappointing.  The bus driver didn’t turn up so the guide acted as driver and guide and just took them around the island’s coast road, not into the interior at all.  For some reasons, gardens and supermarkets were on the agenda, the latter probably because she needed to do shopping herself.  Glad we missed that one!

Flushed with success, Mike wants a beer, so we go to the local micro brewery for dinner.  Carole and I share a small carafe of relatively unpleasant wine while the boys do the beer thing.  Our food is pretty good although it does take some time in arriving.  When the band start up though, we can hardly hear ourselves think and we retreat into the back room which is much better as it is air conditioned.

Photo:  Carole and John at the ‘3 Brassieres’

We walk through the  ‘roach coach’ eating area on the way back – the area where all the food is cooked from travelling vans and you sit out in the open to eat – and we bump into a lot of the other crews. 

Photo:  Wearing a Guinness t-shirt and drinking Hinano - Tahitian beer

I am modelling Victoria’s necklace (sorry sweetheart!) and lots of people comment on how good it looks.  By the time we get back to Jeannius I have decided that I am going to abandon the idea of a formal pearl necklace and go for something more casual instead.  So, it’s back to the shops tomorrow!