Headed to the bar. Well, it’s a dive resort that half-heartedly sells warmish beers to the cruisers that show up to hang out. This week there were a number of well-known Youtubers there, so it could have easily been mistaken for a movie set, complete with autograph seekers and small Youtubers looking to latch on to a piece of the pie. We joked that they’d all have to throw out their audio files thanks to Ali’s laughter in the background. If you know Ali, you know what I mean.

These pics were taken the next day after our failed dive (regulator problem). On the right side of this picture is the pass that we all dive through. Starts on the outside with an incoming tide, cruises through the pass and curves around in front of the dive resort bar. You can actually see the bar as you dive past.

About the only decent picture I got from snorkeling through the pass with the kids. Look closely and you can see that all those things on the bottom are Grouper.

With the weather turning a bit, we moved back over to the Harifa anchorage a few miles away.

You can see in this picture how all the trees are leaning towards us. The winds are so consistent here. Just off the point on the right of this picture is where all the kitesurfing takes place. The kids had already taken two two-hour lessons, but Lowe decided to sit out a third. I took his place. Ouest is already to the point of popping up on her board and taking off on a run. It won’t take many more lessons for her to really nail it down. The instructor threw me in the water with the kite and gave me some basic instructions. After about twenty minutes of flying it around above me he said I was good with the kite and could try it with a board. I got up a few times, for extremely brief periods, but for the most part I was schooled in the art of physics. It was incredible how fast I could go from nicely controlling the kite to suddenly being ripped straight out of the water like a wet dish towel and slapped back down somewhere further along.

Most content beach cat ever.

A yacht with the 3rd tallest carbon fiber mast in the world, and the largest sail in the world, pulled in right behind us one afternoon. That night we were on the beach hanging out with some other cruisers when a couple came walking past and stopped to talk to me. He and his wife were being followed along by their own photographer. For a laugh I asked him with a straight face, “So, what boat are you on?” He said, “We are on the Nevalni. The sloop.” My humor had missed the mark. I suppose in his orbit everyone has a staff photog. I turned around, looked out at the boats and asked, “Which one is that?” He pointed it out to me, and I replied, “Oh, that one. Looks like a nice boat.”

He was friendly, in much the same way that I imagine a CEO to be when he visits the company mailroom. He said he was the the owner and introduced himself by his initials. He was fascinated by the fact that all the cruisers were on their own boats, and that we were all on the beach hanging out together, having a drink, and watching the sunset. Like we were some untouched Amazonian tribe, and he was the first white man to discover us. “So, you are all here on your own boats? And you just come up here and hang out together? Do you all know each other?”

We talked for a couple of minutes about where we were from, where we’d both sailed from, and where we were headed. I committed his initials to memory, fully intending to drop in on the yacht next time we cross paths again. I’m not much of a sailor, but I wouldn’t mind seeing what that thing feels like when the sheets are flying.

These are not the megayacht owners, but instead are a couple of longtime internet friends as well as Wanderer Financial subs. Pretty cool to run into each other way out here. Scott was the one who took me diving the other day, and even filled my tank back up afterwards.

Lowe takes his bacon crispy. Good thing he has Ali to make it for him. Someday, when he has to make his own bacon, he’ll appreciate how good he has it right now.

We moved the thirty miles back up to town to grab some groceries and wait for the next weather window to take us to Tahiti.

Local kids are always fishing or jumping off the pier. One day I decided to bring up a fishing pole that I doubted we’d ever use (we just use hand lines off the back of the boat). I was happy to see a girl, maybe ten years old, on the pier cleaning half a dozen good sized fish. I handed her the pole and she squealed with delight. “Merci, merci.” From the looks of it she doesn’t need a pole to catch fish, but she seemed to like the idea anyway.

If you show up to the boulangerie before about six a.m. there are all sorts of goodies available. The spring rolls are my favorite, actually. And the baguettes here on Fakarava are the best yet. They come out of the back room so hot you can hardly hold them at first, and they are perfectly crispy.

Finally digging into the final refrigerator. A few weeks back I just happened to see a small sign on a wall of the marine store in Nuku Hiva. The sign was weathered, but said that they had electronic thermostats for sale. It was the exact one I would have ordered and had the next day if I had been in the States. I e-mailed them, but didn’t hear back for a few days and figured that was that. But then they wrote back and said they were in Fakarava and would leave it for me there. The install was pretty easy, and I have now successfully repaired all three fridges/freezers on the boat. Which is good, because when we leave Tahiti (French Polynesia), we’re really going to need all of them. We won’t be seeing a proper grocery store for a good long time.

While we’re in town we’ve become regulars at this place for lunch. I’m not even sure what it’s called. It’s the lunchtime restaurant for a small resort just a two-minute dinghy ride from the boat. Good fish sandwiches, delicious poke bowls, and cold bottles of Hinano.

For some reason they are always running out of rice. Fries are good, though. Pretty nice setting for a “lunner” just about every day.