The plan was to get back to Spirit in time for the Tahiti Pearl Regatta, which my mate John had planned to join us for. We were both super excited to be doing it as we share a love for sailing fast and having fun.
It wasn't to be though as early one morning about a week before I was meant to fly out I had a call from a close friend down in Sydney. He had an email from another good mate that runs the beautiful Super Yacht called Ethereal. Anyone that knows Super Yachts knows of her as she's one of the prettiest and high tech yachts that has been built to date. She came out of the Royal Huisman Yard in Holland in 2009 after four years in the making. She's just under 200ft in length and carries a huge amount of sail area within her nearly 500ton hull. So two days later it was a flight to the Galapagos that I was boarding via LA, Miami and Guayaquil then onto Tahiti via yacht not plane, which sounded awesome! The flights were bloody long and after about 38hrs I arrived in Guayaquil where I had a hotel for the night then I flew onto the Galapagos early the next morning. My bags had been lost the night I flew into Ecuador so I was a bit stressed about getting them back to the yacht. After a few worried days onboard they turned up in the Galapagos and we were off. After two days of readying the yacht we were off. The nights at anchor in the Galapagos were awesome with the underwater lights we could see as many as 7-8 sharks swimming around the boat chasing seals and also trying to catch the occasional pelican. The delivery went super well. Being onboard such a lovely yacht with a wonderful chef and cool crew made the journey fun and extremely easy compared to the last time I'd done it on Spirit with the bear minimum. We had no issues at all on the crossing with daily jobs each day and our watches the time flew past. It was so nice to be at sea again and to have that connection again. It's missed and you don't realise how much until you get back out there and breath that salt air and see those amazing sunsets and sunrises. The first few days were spent motor sailing and then we found the trades, which ended up being about 3 days south of our departure point. We tried to sail as deep as we could but on such a huge boat you have to play safe and this means angles of around 140 true. With the easterly breeze this gave us a fairly south westerly heading, which was not on course for the Marquases like we had planned. So after about 6 days of sailing we headed Rangiroa in the western Tuamotos. Once we were a about a day out we could see though that the weather wasn't going to be very nice for our trip down to Tahiti in three days time. The Captain called for us to keep sailing straight onto Tahiti. It worked out well though and after 16 days at sea we pulled into Papeete. The trip on Spirit took the same amount of time and this showed us again how quick she is and how great it is to cruise on a boat that can do those miles each day unpressed and with such ease. It's now the beginning of June and we have spent the last month here doing work on Ethereal. But we did however get away for two weeks of race in Raiatea and Tahaa for the Tahiti Pearl Regatta. I'll be doing another update within the next two weeks with photos and news on this regatta it was awesome and we couldn't recommend it more to anyone coming to this part of the world that loves sailing, wait till you see the photos!!!
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December 2012
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