Our first stop at Nuka Hiva was in Taiohae Bay. This bay is home to the capitol city of the Marquesas islands. It's a pretty little town with nice plantings and the biggest bay that we have seen since our arrival in the marquesas. Big being a very relative term. Unfortunately, the water is a bit cloudy here and there are a lots of boats in the bay, and we are told there are sharks here, so swimming/snorkeling is not on the agenda. They do have a town landing that appears to be inviting from the anchorage, but upon closer inspection reveals a dillapidated ladder on an oystercovered seawall whose shells are just waiting to slice a neat hole in your dingy, that is if the bottom of the rusty ladder doesn't do it first... which it did to our English friends on Seabright. Nothing a patch couldn't fix. Once past the seawall things drastically improve. Right on the dock there is a small breakfast place (although we have no idea what they cook.. the coffee isn't bad though) and a telephone booth, and the nuka hiva extension of the yacht services company that we are using to process our visas, get duty free fuel, and receive replacement parts. This is convenient seeing as this is where we are going to replace our broken rigging. Said rigging is not slated to arrive until sometime next week so we will be touring the Island for some time. On certain days of the week a crepe and soft serve ice cream truck parks itself in front of the yacht services office and puts out a few tables in true french fashion...probably the best strawberry soft serve ice cream we have ever had as well.
As it was Jeff's birthday Angie and Fred decided to take him out to dinner on shore. We found a nice pension on the main road that had a beautiful view of the bay that served pizza from a brick oven as well as a full French and Marquesan menu all in French. Fresh vegtables are not readily found in the magazins here so we each orderd a salad (one salad would have been enough for the three of us). The main course consisted of pizza and some delicious muscles (jeff was able to decifer the menu for at least this item just in time) We hoped to follow dinner with a nice apertif...maybe some baileys and coffee? But as is the case here the full bar isn't really a full bar so we settled for khalua...about 6 ounces each and a cup of coffee..again we see our challenges with the french language. Needless to say it was a very interesting trip down the ladder to the dingy and back out to the boat, but we made it safe and sound.
On July 5 we managed to troubleshoot and fix the problem with the water maker. Turned out it was a bad electrical connection right at the electrical panel. we are getting much better at repairs than we used to be, but it's still exciting to get something big like this working again - especially since this is the one bay in the Marquesas islands where the water you can get on shore is not fit to drink because of the presence of goats and pigs in the water catchment area. No problem, now we can make our own again - yippee!
The bad news is that it doesn't seem like we'll be able to refill our propane tanks here. We have US style tanks that require some sort of an adaptor to fill from the local big tanks. One of the stores here that carries some hardware was filling our style tank up until last Saturday. Now they have stopped for reasons no one knows, and, strangely, they will not sell the adaptor they had to the yacht services people here. Seems we will have to buy one of the tanks they have for the houses here and figure out some way to hook it up to our system. We truly are NEVER bored. There is always something that needs figuring out.
On July 6 we got to experience the joy (fear?) of refueling here. There is a really tall concrete dock that is for bigger boats to tie up to. For small boats like us they have you put out an anchor med style where you put out an anchor off your bow and then back the boat up to the dock and you throw a line off the back of the boat and you sort of hover near the dock, and fill your tanks from an enormous fuel hose which drapes from the dock down into the water and back up on the boat. To make everything more interesting the wind changes direction in this bay every five minutes, but at least we have full fuel tanks again. Later we had a great curry dinner on Seabright with Jo, Dave and Beth. There was flatbread with it and we have been asking for the recipe ever since.
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