More Company

14 November 2008

Arnold caught the ferry to Moorea, rented a small motorbike, and went around the entire island by road. He will present some of the photos in this blog. During the day Brenda and I did some gift shopping and I put in a lot of effort to set myself up with Paypal so that I can put 10 Euros into my Skype account, which will enable me to telephone land lines.

For a day this was an all-Australian jetty (other than a small commercial runabout). I mentioned earlier the arrival of Morry and Irene in a large catamaran. The catamaran is a “Lagoon 50”, about 20 tons, brand new out of France. We haven't been inside of it yet but Morry says that it has 4 queen-sized beds, 4 bath rooms, 5 showers, air conditioning, washer, drier, entertainment centre ... you get the idea. He said that the basic boat cost about $1 million AUD which is what we had figured. However, with the extra goodies the final cost was more like $1.2 to $1.3 million AUD. I asked him if it was cheaper to have the boat delivered rather than shipped. He said that shipment would have cost about $120,000 AUD whereas delivering was going to cost the owner about $70,000 AUD.

Early in the day a Beneteau Oceanis 45 was brought to the jetty and there was a lot of work by a team of people cleaning it up. Morry says that the boat is a new one just arrived from France and it is being prepared for handover. The boat has an extremely wide transom and two wheels.

At night the three of us wound up in that little cafe that we had seen the previous Friday and sure enough the group of local musicians were having a great time playing and singing Polynesian songs. I would describe one of the players as the Jimi Hendrix of the ukulele. People were playing bongos, upturned plastic garbage bins for bass, improvised maracas, etc, and some were switching from instrument to instrument. It was very pleasant for us: beers for Arnold and myself, a tall orange juice for Brenda, al fresco in the cool of the evening, surrounded by some Polynesian culture.

Attached are photos of the boats and one of Brenda off like a school girl to go shopping.