Time out in Cape Town

Cape Town from Blouberg Strand

A couple of pleasant but busy weeks in Tahiti saw Morgane cleaned, maintained, and prepared to be left alone on the hard at the Tahiti Nautic Center . Morgane was very professionally hauled out and parked up by Yvan and his crew.

Morgane is hauled out of her element

Tahiti being warm and humid we are worried about mildew and mould growing in our absence and therefore cleaned everything we could. Bugs may be an issue too so all vents, the exhaust and everything have to be made beastie proof.  However we need to have some ventilation through the boat so the mosquito mesh was fixed over all the vents that didn’t already have an integral screen.

Morgane on the props at Tahiti Nautic Center

Before leaving we left several ant and cockroach traps in place and the final thing we did on departure was to fire a fumigation bomb and close the hatch.

Whilst we didn’t think much of Papeete we did enjoy Tahiti, it is a beautiful island and the local people that we did meet were everything that you are lead to expect Tahitians to be; Friendly, warm, helpful, and generous. We were waiting for the bus/hitching twice on the road to Tahiti and the airport and each time we were given a lift by lovely people who both went the extra mile for us going out of their way to make sure we got to exactly the right place.

Our flights out of Tahiti took us via Auckland, New Zealand and Dubai to Cape Town. The Auckland to Dubai leg is normally 17 hours but our flight was diverted to Kuala Lumpur due to a medical emergency aboard adding about three hours to the flight. We just made the connection to Cape Town and amazingly so did our bags that had been checked all the way through in Tahiti. Well done to Emirates for that!

We are now in Cape Town working for Pelagic Expeditions with Alec and Giselle Hazell to refit Pelagic Australis. The schedule is tight as we aim to depart Cape Town at the end of July to sail to Stanley.

You can read Skip’s news update which describes what we are up to in Cape Town here.

It’s not all terribly hard work. Today we managed to escape for a walk in the Blouberg Nature Reserve with its great view back towards Cape Town as you can see from the pic at the beginning of this post.