Most people don’t come to Tahiti with the idea of doing a bunch of work, but that’s sort of what has happened to us. Admittedly, we could have done more to prepare our boat for sailing around the world. We’ve got a list of excuses for why we didn’t, but at the end of the day it doesn’t really matter, some things just need to get done now. We sailed the boat for an hour before leaving to cross the Pacific—the next three-thousand miles were our shakedown cruise. When we mentioned that off-handedly to a cruiser the other day we could actually see her jaw drop. Unimpressed, no doubt. But hey, sometimes you’ve just got to go.

A dock in downtown Papeete seems to us to be as good a place as any to work on that shakedown list.

Replaced the gennaker and main halyards. I’m not sure the main halyard would have held in a big blow any longer. The worst spot along its length was where it had gotten stuck on a sharp-edged winch mount on the mast while I cranked ever harder on the winch at the back. Honestly, I probably shouldn’t have been relying on that line to take me up and down the mast all week. Electrical tape doesn’t take a lot of weight. The gennaker halyard was probably okay, but it was so stiff and crusty that it was just a pain to handle. No amount of soaking in fabric softener was bringing it back to life.

This is the old main halyard running alongside the one line we did replace back in Mexico, the jib line.

The resident turtle. Nice to be in a marina in the middle of a city and have water this clean.

This marina doesn’t take reservations, and there are hundreds of boats at anchor. We really got lucky scoring a spot on the dock while we are here. Boat repairs and provisioning are infinitely easier to accomplish from a marina dock.

Replace the traveler line. Another stiff old line, and one that needs to absorb too much stress to leave it as it was.

Replace the jack lines. The lines were falling apart, and replacing these to create all new jack lines was an easy job. I leave everything a little long for a week or two so I can adjust them if necessary, then go around and trim them up when I’m sure the bag is hanging where I want it to be.

Change engine oil. Routine maintenance that was probably one hundred hours overdue. One thing I loved about our Spindrift and Grand Banks engines was how easy it was to change the oil. Now, back on a cat with little Volvos I’m once again relegated to a tiny, messy hand pump with a skinny tube running down the dipstick hole to draw out one teaspoon of oil per pump. Inevitably one of the tubes falls out of the pump and oil spills everywhere.

Repair leaking raw water pump on starboard engine. This was a relatively new development. Fortunately, I was able to find a replacement seal on my first trip to the store, and it was a simple fix. Every single boat engine I’ve ever had has had this problem repeatedly.

If we had to walk everywhere this week there’d be no time to actually do the work. We made good use of these little scooter rentals. They also had cars which were good for grocery store runs, and way easier than hassling with car rental agencies and going to the airport to fill out paperwork.

Inspect port engine exhaust elbow. Recently I began noticing a sweet smell from the exhaust on that engine. I knew what that meant, and what I was going to find when I investigated. Back in Puerto Vallarta I took the exhaust elbow off and found a gaping hole corroded through the heat exchanger. This time I didn’t see a hole when I removed the elbow, but one light poke at the edge of the heat exchanger with a screwdriver produced one. I chipped away and ended up with a pencil sized hole. I filled the hole with some JBWeld style epoxy, cleaned out the exhaust elbow, installed a new gasket, and put it back together. It might hold fine for ten hours, it might last ten years. Realistically, probably somewhere in between. This is a smaller concern for me on a catamaran (two engines) than a monohull.

Replace freshwater pump. Our water tanks have finally stopped clogging up our filters with calcium deposits. The only pump I could buy in the Marquesas was a 3 gph pump, which is pretty weak. I got a 4 gph pump here, and will save the other as a backup.

Have Code Zero sail repaired. We weren’t even out of Banderas Bay when our Code Zero blew out. I’ve been looking forward to having that sail back in the arsenal. The Parasailor is my favorite sail but is only good for wind 120 degrees or further aft. The Code Zero will take over from 120 to about 60 in the light winds category. $250 got that taken care of and the sail repair guy said the rest of the sail looked to be in pretty good condition still.

Replace navigation and anchor lights. At the top of the mast is a big light fixture that contains both the navigation (combo red/green/white) light and the anchor light. When we left Mexico everything worked. Then the navigation light went out. Then a few weeks later the anchor light went out. I don’t mind going up the mast, but doing so in the Marquesas just about killed me because of the swell. I saw enough on that trip up to see that the lightbulbs themselves were falling apart from corrosion. We couldn’t find replacement bulbs, and somehow the boat didn’t have a single spare bulb on it either.

So here in Papeete, in a calm marina, I went back up and replaced the bulbs. That wasn’t the smoking gun I had been hoping it would be. They still didn’t work. Working on the lights is a bit of a pain. Sitting in the bosuns chair on the main halyard leaves you about a foot too low to actually see the top of the mast. So, I had to bring some rope up with me, tie a couple of loops in it and lay it over the top of the mast. Then stick my feet in and stand up, while simultaneously making sure my butt stayed in the bosuns chair in case I fell. It’s awkward, to say the least. I removed the whole lighting assembly and was thrilled to find an exact replacement at the store. Thrilled because that meant I could use the same mounting holes. Drilling new holes would have been pretty well impossible for me with my setup. I installed that, wired it up, and… only one light worked. I switched the wiring around, and now the other light worked. I could have one or the other, but not both. I chose the running lights. I’ll need to run an entirely new three-wire bundle down the mast at some point, but that point isn’t now.

Replace the mast deck/steaming light. Along the same lines, this is a light fixture located about halfway up the mast. It has two lights, one that shines down on the deck, which is just for your own convenience and another that is a white light you are supposed to turn on when your boat is moving under engine power. Once our navigation light had gone out, we began using this light in order to have something shining at night when we were underway. Then that light went out too. I found that this thing was all corroded as well, and once again found an exact replacement. I wired this one up and everything worked perfectly on the first try.

All in, I think I went up and down the mast six times to fix lights and replace lines. Ali was grateful for our electric winch, and I’m grateful that Ali didn’t “accidentally” let the line slip when she was lowering me back down at the end of each trip.

Organize lockers. Time to go through every locker, toss out things that haven’t been used or that we still haven’t figured out the purpose of. Get everything back in order.

Replaced the scuba regulators. Not really a boat project so much as a boat expense. It’s no fun when you can’t rely on your scuba equipment to work properly. All new regulators should see us going in the water a lot more often.

Restock groceries. We’ve pretty much burned through our food supplies and it’s time to load up for the next couple of months. Carrefour is like a Super Walmart, so stocking up has been pretty easy. Expensive, but easy. About the only thing we haven’t found at any of the stores here, that is sort of a staple food in our family, is refried beans.

Birthday presents. Always have to be planning ahead with this lifestyle. Lowe has a birthday coming up soon. We’ll be in the middle of nowhere. Preparations need to be made.

Ali tackled the port hull one day.

The neighbors flying their drone. (I later found out that the neighbor was Mark Zuckerberg.)

Speaking of drones, I had planned to replace ours (the one I flew right into the ocean a few weeks back) while we were here, but I just couldn’t bring myself to pay the Tahiti price for it. The one I want is about $800 in the States, but they only had the lower quality version here and it still cost nearly twice that much. We were already throwing money around like we won the lottery—a line had to be drawn somewhere.

Strikes me as odd that countries always seem to export their worst beers to the rest of the world, and that people actually buy them. Why in the world would anyone drink a Bud when Hinano is available?

We were laughing at the absurd price of this cheeseburger. It was fine, but not thirty bucks fine. Family of four, average lunchtime meal, no drinks, one hundred dollars. Let’s just say we eat out a lot less often than we would like.

Papeete is a pretty walkable city. A quarter mile here, a half mile there, and by the end of the day we’ve racked up a few miles and sore legs.

We rented a car and took off to get away from the boat for the day. It’s a relatively short drive of just a couple hours to circle Tahiti along the coast. We probably should have veered off inland instead. The coast road was mostly uninteresting. Despite being very close to the water, we could rarely see it. What we saw the majority of the time was eight-foot walls of gray cinderblock on each side of the road. Every property is blocked in like a prison. We stopped off at a couple of beaches, some gardens, and a waterfall which was all very nice, but all in all it wasn’t a favorite island drive for us.