4/11/2011 - Hiva Oa, Marquesas

You would think after 21 days on the boat that we would get off the boat, right?  Not really.  We spent the whole weekend hanging out on the boat.  We were productive, just not very mobile.  It might have something to do with town being a 2 mile walk one way?  Yesterday was Sunday and we had intentions of going into town and listening to the singing at the church, but we stayed in bed instead.  So that’s my excuse for not updating the blog in the last few days…not much to tell.  I figured you were tired of hearing about laundry (which is what I did).

We did manage to get off the boat a few times to look for a place to swim.  Saturday we took the dinghy out to a little island and took a poke at snorkeling.  Jake was the only one that got in the water as it looked pretty dead to Andy and I.  But we did see a big turtle so all wasn’t lost.  After we let Jake swim back at the boat, I was looking through one of our guides and it said  (I’m paraphrasing here), “not a good idea to swim in this bay due to the large shark population.”  Nice.  The water is kind of murky as there is a small river that feeds into it, so that makes sense.

Yesterday we decided to go back to that river since we saw some locals swimming in there.  It was murky too, but Jake had fun playing in the little stream where the river met the beach/ocean and it was a nice place to cool off as it’s quite hot in the middle of the day here.

Somebody has built a nice little shade for themselves on the beach.

There's a little shower at the boat ramp that proved to be Jake's
favorite part of the day.

Today we’re going to go back into town and pick up a few more veggies and fruit and possibly head out to another nearby island tomorrow.  We’re waiting on our duty free fuel certificate to be stamped by our agent so we can get fuel in Nuka Hiva before we leave the Marquesas (we don’t need any just yet).  

Then tomorrow we’re going to try and head out.  This island is really pretty but it’s more of a stopover to check in.  Not a lot to explore.  Well, that’s not true.  There are a lot of archeological sites and Tikis and there is a tour guide that will take you around to most of them, but the tour is $250.  If we were to find some more people to share it with, it might be worthwhile, but that is proving hard to do as we have 3 people and the car only comfortably holds 4, as well as the next tour wouldn’t be until Wednesday and we have limited time in the French Polynesia Islands and think we should spend our time (and $$) elsewhere on things that interest us a little more (like diving, pearl farms, etc).  But for anyone heading this way, the review of the tour was great, so if it’s something you want to do, go for it…just isn’t in the cards for us this time.

You can see how crowded the anchorage is and how close we
are to shore (Savannah on the far right with her bat wings up).

One item of note is this anchorage...it's kind of tight.  There are 14 boats in here and we're stacked on top of each other, most with stern hooks.  There are a few boats that decided not to use stern hooks.  Yesterday we watched two of them collide.  It was quite interesting to watch all the hand gestures going back and forth.  They were french so of course I couldn't eavesdrop on what they were saying, but in the end, one boat pulled in their chain a little bit and put out a stern hook, but the other one decided to leave things be.  We'll see how that works out.

Two French boats discussing options after a small collision at anchor

Time to make the pancakes.  Stick with us, it promises to get more exciting…we’re just getting our land legs back.