Plan No. 1
Exchanging the muffler of the genset already on Saturday. I hope that DHL will fly to Tahiti early because the processing in the USA was pretty quick at the beginning. However, now since 4 days the status on the tracking site is always “clearing event”. Yesterday I do concerned that I sent a mail to Thierry of DHL Fa’a’a (Pape’ete airport).

Unfortunately I’ll get a reply from Thierry only on Monday. Curious what it will be?

The service is called DHL Express but I rather call it DHL Slowpress.

Tevai, my friend in Tahiti is on stand-by to ship the spare part to Raiatea with the next available ferry and I’ll pick it up directly at the ferry.

How does this unpleasant story develop? All I can say now is “stay tuned!”.

Plan No. 2
Our planned hike up to Mt Temehani fell through as well because of rain. Already during the night I woke up once hearing the rain dripping on the deck and hatch above me. I started wondering about the weather a few hours later.

When I got up early, Shigeo was already sitting in the cockpit with an unhappy face. We looked at the clouds every 5 min to finally give up. We had rain at MaRe and the mountains were covered in clouds and rain. Not much to be said.

Only in the afternoon hours the rain stopped and the sun came out again. But then it was too late for the hike. Right now it’s sunny and has a bit of wind to charge the batteries at least a bit.

The next chance for the hike depends now on the spare parts situation. Should the spare parts fly on Monday, we can hike on Tuesday. On Wednesday I will try to complete the exchange of the spare part. Unfortunately I have to remove quite a lot to replace the special muffler.

Beside this, I did smaller boat jobs and prepared my waypoints (WPT) up to the possible anchorage in the lagoon of Penrhyn Island.

Later today, after replacing an LED lamp, I’ll send a letter to Kiritimati to ask for the best of the 3 channels in the only pass into the lagoon is the best and where approximate I could drop the anchor. I do this because locals have the best knowledge of the situation.