Taiohae has a dinghy dock, shops, Internet, a gathering place for cruisers (but not a dockside bar) and a local yacht services agent who can facilitate essentials like parts shipping, officialdom and some repairs. It’s the easy life compared to where we’ve been but despite all that we were eager to move on. Jack spent an afternoon topping up our fuel tank, which involved schlepping jerry jugs back and forth, and we did a bit more provisioning while the getting is good.
We were reluctant to leave without a solution to the watermaker problem so we asked Alex from Enki II if he’d take a look; maybe a third pair of eyes would see something we’ve missed. His conclusion was that no, it all looked and sounded normal but maybe clean out some of the hoses. We’d replaced most of the hoses when we replumbed the system but a few of them are quite long and cumbersome. We agreed they could do with some scrubbing so we did that and changed the prefilters once again and turned on the system just to test it before our last resort, a membrane cleaning, even though there were no indications it was fouled. Lo and behold, we made potable water! We did so little — changed filters that weren’t even dirty, cleaned a few hoses that were — that we’re not sure what our problem was. Perhaps Alex’s laying on of hands was the ticket. We’d had the same experience in Golfito with Robert the mechanic and our alternator. The common factor is that Robert and Alex are both Hungarian, so from now on, we’ll stick to magical Hungarians for all our Laying On Of Hands needs.
So we’re set to go. We said goodbye for now to Tim from Liberty Call, who’s been our frequent companion ever since we made landfall a few hours apart in Fatu Hiva. He’s stuck trying to fix an alternator problem himself and we hope he gets it sorted soon and catches up.
We only moved six miles west to Daniel’s Bay where we hope to clean the slime off EV’s bottom and organize ourselves for the jump to our last Marquesan island, Ua Pou.
