Good-by French Polynesia, Hello Suwarrow

If only the good-bye/hello could be so quick as speaking it! For the Google Earth followers, we are at 15.52.427 lat and 153.56.858 long. We got back to Tahiti on the evening of Aug 30/10, arriving to a lovely warm 25 degrees C from an un-seasonally cool 14 degrees C in Calgary. Our boat was waiting patiently at the dock for our return. Our agent, Laurent, had done a good job of making sure everything continued working properly in our absence. His attention to this was not without peril though as we had dropped the general information to several of our boating friends along the dock that we would be away and to keep an eye out for suspicious activity on our boat. So it seems that Laurent was called upon several times to prove that his intentions were legitimate - our friend Yasmin threatening him with her mop! Our final days in Tahiti were busy, one day to wash the thick layer of grime off of the boat - life just feels better in a clean boat, one day to fill the pantry and freezers up again and our third day was topping up the fuel (ouch - that hurt) and departing for Suwarrow in the north Cook Islands. You can tell that you are getting to be a "dock potatoe" when you obsess for days about what the weather conditions are going to be over the duration of a passage. How quickly we forget what our little boat can handle. The weather forecasts were calling for 2.3 m waves at 7 second intervals with 17 knots of wind - that sounded pretty intimidating while we were tied up, but now we are happily splashing along in all of that and it really isn't too bad at all. We are actually getting a big push along our route as the waves are coming from behind. This trip's duration is 4.5 days and it is the first for Glen and I to do more than one overnight in a row. It is pretty lonely out here by ourselves as the majority of the other cruising boats did this trip in late July. "Oso Blanco" is already in Tonga and we won't be there until October.

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