It’s Thursday morning, Beetle remains happily riding to the mooring in the lagoon of Bora Bora. Shindig, with Rob on board, arrived yesterday afternoon after dropping off his crew Jeff in Raiatea for an airplane flight back to Jeff’s home. I spotted Shindig’s position on the AIS display, and when he popped in I dinghied over to the mooring and handed the line up to him – makes it much easier for the singlehander as you don’t have to run forward and fish around with the boat hook to capture the mooring eye before the boat drifts too far away to reach it.
The last two nights have been close to clear of clouds, the moon doesn’t arrive until late at night, the result of which is to have the night sky filled with stars. Definitely worth lying down on the deck and staring straight up at the sky, it’s kind of fun to see our corner of the Western Spiral Arm.
During the day I’ve been experimenting with the GoPro video footage I got from my snorkels on the reef, re-learning Adobe’s Premier Pro and After Effects software tools. Also out and about with the dinghy, exploring the town a bit, another visit to the Super U, and spent some time under the boat with the air compressor to clean up the propeller and shaft (no bottom paint on those two items, therefore the harder stuff grows on them and it takes time to scrape everything clean). The Max Prop zinc is in good order, all shiny clean.
Last night Shindig joined Pangea and Beetle for happy hour at Bloody Mary’s, that was fun to catch up and hear about what he’s been up to. About the middle of happy hour we figured it would be fun to have dinner there as well, only they were booked and couldn’t seat us until 8pm. That’s late for the cruisers, so we all departed at 7:30 headed back for the boats. I’ll have to check, but I think Shindig made dinner reservations for Friday evening, so we’ll try again then!
Today’s plan is to hit the water for another round of snorkeling with the GoPro camera (and probably the still camera as well), see what’s down there, and spend some time capturing more footage to run through the video software. An issue with using a video camera while snorkeling is the surface waves bounce you around, and some of that bounce makes it to the camera resulting in jittery images. I’ll try spending more time below the surface and it will be interesting to see if that produces more stable video.
All is good here, enjoying the place, it sure is easy to be here! I particularly like the ring road around the island being set at sea level – all the stores one might want are along that road, right at sea level, and if you’re lucky you can dinghy up to the store and tie up – super convenient for the dinghy people.
I’ve also been talking with the harbor folks in Hawaii, and learned that Keehi Marina (a private marina) is likely too shallow for Beetle’s 8′ draft. The folks at Ala Wai (a state-managed harbor) have sent along information about what I need to do to obtain a transient berth (meaning less than 6 months per year there), I will be printing out a form, filling it out, scanning it and emailing it back to them. Tiger Beetle will be floating office for at least a little while today to do that work, which isn’t as simple as it sounds as I have to get the equipment out, run all the wires, plug everything in, do the work (which is easy), then break everything down again and put it away. Hopefully something will work out with Ala Wai Harbor on Oahu.
Have fun!
– rob
Tiger Beetle Sailing 