French Polynesia

At anchor you can smell wet loamy earth and the perfume of flowers. You hear the wind in the palm trees, the roosters crowing at all hours and the roar of ocean swell on rocky shoreline. Everywhere you look you see the brown-green of earth, the white-and-blue of the sky or the blue-green of the tropical water.

The heat sears us from the sky, reflects off of the water for a milder but no less burning angle, radiates from all flat surfaces and surrounds us n the damp air when the wind stops. We spend our days wet: wet from sweat, wet from swimming and snorkeling, wet from the fast, intense rain showers that sweep overhead several times a day. After 4 winters in British Columbia, we smile while we bake and grin while we sweat.

We’ve settled into a routine of a spurt of activity in the morning, followed by a long period of avoiding movement in the afternoon. We sit in the cockpit sweating, moving our panels to reduce the sun, and letting our eyes feast on the scenery. We swim off of the back of the boat or use our halyards to do rope swings.

As the sun loses its fierce heat, or as the clouds roll in, we do boat tasks or life tasks. In the evening we watch the sun set, listen to the radio nets as we sip our cold drinks and start deciding whether we can stand the heat of cooking. As night falls the heat subsides to a comfortable level and we watch a bit of TV or read or watch the stars and then retreat to our cool v-berth for sleep.