American Spirit II - Day 108; Last Day in Moorea, Made Bread and Bali Hai Pool; Monday, April 21, 2014

Up at 7:00 AM. Best morning in Moorea so far. No cloud, which means no raid and no wind. Beautiful.

Breakfast consisted of eggs and bacon, plus chilled grapefruit and French bread.

After breakfast Stephen and Joel took the dingy and headed down the bay, looking for a store to buy some beer. They returned a couple of hours later empty handed. Seems the Monday after Easter is a national holiday. Stores closed. A bigger holiday than Good Friday. However, they managed to borrow 2 six packs from Nexus.

I worked on itinerary for David and Paul, arriving late April 26 from Chicago and Phoenix. Early afternoon I took Tracy Ramsey's bread recipe and made my first loaf of bread on boat. Missing a couple of items, like a mixing bowl and had to use butter in place of shortening. One of the problems in shopping in a foreign country is that sometimes its hard to find in the store what you want because the printing on all the packages and jars and cans is in, in the case of French Polynesia, French. Go figure. And having never bought shortening before, I didn't know what a typical package looked like. And once in a foreign country, you can't find a small dictionary of English and French or Spanish to use to figure out what the name of a food item is in that country. The bread must have been OK because Stephen and Joel ate it.

From 3:30 PM - 5:00 PM we hung by the Bali Hai Hotel pool. Using the pool, lounge chairs and their showers. Any time you can shower off the boat you save water that you have in limited supply, because we don't make water with our water maker in an anchorage, due to the possibility of 'dirty' water. Some countries dump their sewage into the ocean, like Panama, and you never know if another boat in the anchorage is using their holding tank or dumping overboard.

Dinner at 5:45 PM consisted of blackened T-Bone steaks, fresh green beans sautéed by Stephen, and baked potatoes. After dinner, Stephen and I went over a party at Graywolf, a large gray motor boat that was traveling west to east from New Zealand to the United Kingdom, with a crew of five. The boat was built like a military vessel, with water tight doors and armored glass. Very impressive. Around 9:00 PM we gave Sheldon and Ness a ride back to Nexus and went home ourselves. Joel was asleep, and Stephen and I watch the movie The Four Feathers. Lights out around 11:00 PM.

Brian Fox