La Vie en Tahiti
- labadiemichael
- May 16
- 3 min read
On the morning of April 29, the silhouette of Tahiti appeared on the horizon. Tahiti is the largest island in French Polynesia, and its capital, Papeete, with around 26,000 residents, is by far the largest city within a radius of thousands of miles. That makes it a central hub for sailors crossing the Pacific – and for us as well, there was plenty to take care of here. Right after our arrival, Song went on the hard. One of the through-hulls had started leaking and needed to be replaced. Maneuvering the boat into the narrow dock, where the travel lift would later haul us ashore, comes with its fair share of adrenaline, but before long the boat was resting safely on stands in the boatyard. While Mike coordinates everything with the yard crew, Felix picks up our rental car so we can immediately start tackling our to-do list. First stop: dropping off our broken watermaker for repairs. After that, we spend hours visiting the city’s many marine supply stores in search of long-awaited spare parts. Later that day, we checked into an Airbnb we had rented for the time the boat would be out of the water. A soft bed, air conditioning, a large TV, a washing machine, and supermarkets within walking distance – after weeks at sea, that felt like pure luxury.
Over the following days, we did countless maintenance jobs on the boat: replacing pumps, scrubbing the hull, cleaning the anchor chain, repairing the toilet and so on. Ironically, most of our time wasn’t spent on the actual work itself, but on driving from one chandlery to the next in search of the right parts. One day, we made a road trip to Tahiti Iti to visit the world-famous Teahupoʻo surf break, circling the whole island on a 70-mile drive. In the evenings, we explored the bars and restaurants of Papeete looking for the city’s best nightlife.
By the beginning of the following week, the through-hull repairs were finally complete. Song went back in the water, and we moved into a slip at the marina in downtown Papeete. Tony left the boat for a few days to spend time with his parents who came to visit. Meanwhile, Mike and Felix began dismantling parts of the interior so they could re-varnish all the woodwork. Originally, we had hoped to hire a professional for the varnish work, but we couldn’t find anyone with both the necessary skills and availability, so we decided to tackle the job ourselves. Unfortunately, the weather was far from ideal — torrential rain poured down for days on end, leaving us only short breaks between showers to work.
The varnishing was finished, Tony had returned to the boat, and we received the good news that our watermaker was supposedly repaired. But during testing, water still sprayed from multiple leaks and the system failed to build the necessary pressure. Since the required replacement parts would take at least another month to arrive, we ultimately had no other choice but to buy a completely new watermaker. Thankfully, the new unit could be installed on short notice, and at last we are able to hoist the sails again — by this point, all of us have had more than enough of Tahiti.
For the past few days, we’ve been in Bora Bora, enjoying our final days in French Polynesia. Early next week, we’ll set off on the next major leg of our voyage. Instead of sailing to Niue as originally planned, we are now heading toward American Samoa, as the wind has shifted into an unfavorable direction. But that’s a story for the next blog post …
🦐