Underway Again (Briefly)!

After an all too brief stay on Fatu Hiva, we pulled up the anchor this morning bound for the Atuona on the island of Hiva Oa. We will do our official clearance here into French Polynesia. We had an absolutely amazing experience on Fatu Hiva and hope that the rest of our stay throughout the islands are as good. What really blew me away was the generosity of the other cruisers, a New Zealand couple in particular, Paul and Gina on their boat "Solace" We met them on Thursday afternoon when they stopped by to say hi in their dinghy. We invited them on board and as we were talking, I mentioned the problems we had with our radio. They knew about it from hearing us and Toketie on different HF nets and then they offered to lend us their spare antenna tuner until we could get ours replaced (hopefully in Papeete). It turned out that they had a complete spare radio setup on board. Well I went over to their boat that evening and we tried their spare tuner on his ICOM radio (same make and model as ours). The tuner worked so the next day Paul uninstalled it from their boat, brought it over, I put it in place and made the appropriate connections, and voila, it worked!. I managed to get all our backlogged emails and last night I spoke to the net controller for the Pacific Seafarers net in Hawaii and his comment was that he had never heard me so clearly. Obviously our tuner had been failing slowly for some time and finally gave out on the long passage. The pain in the butt of all this is that in order to get a warranty replacement I have to send the tuner back to the place of purchase (Victoria BC) and then they will ship a replacement to me. I will try and see if I can ship it off from Hiva Oa this week and get the process started.
The other major highlight from Fatu Hiva was our hike up to the waterfall yesterday. A good 50-60 minute uphill walk that brings you to this stunning grotto surrounded by vertical cliffs with the water flowing over them. It was absolutely amazing!! We had a bit of a birthday party for David last night to honour his 60th year and then a short nights sleep to get underway by 06:00 this morning. We have sailed most of the way but are motoring the last 10 miles to get the batteries fully charged before we squeeze our way into Atuona

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