Am I seriously going to write a single logbook entry about FOUR of the Society Islands? Yes.

We are truly on “The Giddyup Plan” right now or as we have been calling it, Estrellita is moving “Charter Style” – referring to the fact that charter boats are often in a different anchorage for each meal. We are no longer on the leisurely movement schedule of someone with a long stay visa. We are on the westward slide with the 2014 pack of puddle jumpers trying to pack in as much as we can before we have to escape the hurricane zone.

We had been to Moorea before and Raiatea before. Mostly we did the same type of things in both places on our recent visit. We had guests in for part of our stay in Moorea (THANKS MOM & DAD!) and we saw stingrays and toured around the island. Raiatea was a short stop at the Uturoa town dock for groceries at the Champion.

Tip: This has to be the best kept provisioning secret in French Polynesia. Easier than a car even, you can roll your cart full of groceries directly alongside your vessel – not even a dinghy ride!

Huahine was a new stop for us and we arrived in the company of new friends aboard SV Liward. We had hoped to kite but the wind didn’t like that idea and after some fun times and live music we moved on after only a couple of days.

We hit a single anchorage on Tahaa, also a new stop for us. We anchored on a sand ledge, in front of a lovely motu, snorkeled in the strong current of a hoa (false pass) with excellent variety of fish and not bad coral. Really worth the stop.

…then we sailed to Bora TO CHECK OUT OF FRENCH POLYNESIA!

Since our 2012 puddle jump, this visit was our fifth time in Tahiti with our boat (!) and we have also been twice additionally to Tahiti without the boat when flying in and out of the country. This time we had guests (Livia’s parents) and we saw even more of the island than we have seen before. It is true that there always seems to be something new, something more to see even in places that you have spent so much time exploring.

Leaving Tahiti was painful. Over the years we have made some good friends who live in Tahiti and the goodbyes were difficult. Leaving Tahiti behind was also exciting. Sailing out of Tahiti meant westward and new landfalls. Each time we say goodbye to a region of French Polynesia it is a bittersweet mix of sadness and excitement.

To have internet strong enough to be able to rent movies to our laptop is a rare thing for us on this leg of the journey. On top of that, to have a huge HD TV that we can plug into the laptop and watch said movies, is a real treat. The last time we saw a film in the theater was in February and I don’t expect to have the opportunity again for more than a year. The first thing we did, as the narcissists that we are, was to watch some of our own movies which were filmed in HD on an actual big HD screen. Way nicer looking than on our laptop.

We rented a bunch of movies and while I won’t bore you with our thoughts on the run-of-the-mill comic and other movies we rented, I will mention two sailing and/or ocean related films that we saw.

The first ocean related movie was the most recent version of Kon-Tiki. I’ll start by admitting that I haven’t read the book by Heyerdahl or seen any other versions of the movie. I thought the movie was beautifully filmed, was interested to find out that Thor’s wife’s name was Liv, and, having made my own less dramatic landfalls, I was impressed by the emotional enormity of that particular landfall to the men aboard.

The second ocean related movie was Chasing Ice. If you want to be deeply disturbed by glacier retreat while at the same time overwhelmed by beautiful pictures of ice formations, this is your film. I’m very glad we had a chance to see it.

THANK YOU MOM! We put your donation to good work.

In other news, I’ve started making a collection of sailing films, mostly freely available online here. It isn’t finished yet and I’ll write more when it is.

We still love Bora after a second visit. Overwhelmed by tourists? Yes. But it is also incredibly beautiful and we keep meeting such nice and generous people each time we visit. If you stop in Bora, use the Bora Laverie for your wash and take some time to chat with the owner. We didn’t have much time to play while we were here this visit.

Our plan is to apply for a long stay visa for French Polynesia which must be done in our home country. We leave the boat on the hard in French Polynesia and fly back to Seattle in early December where we will apply for the visa in Vancouver. The visa should allow us to stay in French Polynesia as long as we want, which we currently are guessing is about 1.5 years after our return flight in April. More on that application process after it is completed.

We spent over a week in Bora Bora getting our legs back under us after our passage from the Cook Islands back to French Polynesia. We needed to refill the boat with propane, gas, diesel, water, and fresh food. We also scurried around making reservations, booking tickets and arranging all of the things we needed arranged to leave our boat on the hard and fly out. We had avoided making any of those plans because, as mentioned previously, we weren’t 100% sure we would make it back.

We’re also looking forward to seeing our families and friends and all of the things we’ve missed about N American cities like sitting at coffee shops and going to the movies. Lastly, we’ll buy all of the crap we think we need for the boat and haul it back in our luggage.

I still can’t believe we’ll be visiting in winter.

If you know of any fun events or opportunities, suitable for two cruisers who just bought plane tickets from French Polynesia to SeaTac (that means poor), send us an email (s.v.estrellita@gmail.com). We’ll be in and out of the Seattle-Vancouver area with possible side trips to Quebec and, if we can find miles tickets or similar, Colorado.

We’ve been too remote for internet access for a while now and unable to upload anything with pictures although I continued to write semi-regularly. As is usually the case on this blog, the posts come out when I have internet access and so the content of our blog is almost always out of date. We are currently sitting on the porch of the CICC (Cook Islands Christian Church) Minister’s house in Penryhn, enjoying his hospitality and internet.

Here is a little photographic proof for our families, that we are having fun and relaxing…um…in case anyone doubted it.

What little Spanish I have accumulated since our entry into Mexico in mid-October has disappeared with the arrival of our latest fly-in guest, Carol's mother Marcelle.

For those of you who haven't met us, Carol is French-Canadian, a native French speaker, and began learning English in his late teens. His mother is a francophone and since Carol and I met I have been sporadically working on my French. With each visit to Quebec to see his family, my French comprehension surges and then subsides when I return home and get lazy about practicing. I spent a month in Paris (thanks Christine!) which helped and I took 2 years of high school French which I have mostly forgotten but which must have helped somehow.

This past week, with Marcelle visiting and dreams of French Polynesia and meeting French cruisers in mind, I have been doing my best to be brave and speak, speak, speak rather than relying on Carol for partial translations. We met a French couple who had chartered a boat and, while the mix of Quebec and French accents was confusing to me, I had a chance to practice with new speakers.

I feel like I've had a bit of a language break-through in the sense that I finally have enough French to hold conversations on a variety of topics and I understand most of what people are saying to me. Of course, when two Francophones speak to each other very quickly, or when the wine starts flowing, I start to lose the thread of conversation, but even those situations are becoming easier for me.

I have made some spectacular mistakes such as telling Carol's mother that there was a giant cat with no teeth that ate very small shrimp in the area of La Paz (I was trying to describe whale sharks). I also like to confuse the words for eggs and eyes and also the words for ears and toes. Nothing like offering your mother-in-law scrambled eyes for breakfast.

But I'm improving and looking forward to visiting a country where I can have meaningful conversations with the local residents.

I will always remember Mexico fondly as the first place that I bribed a police officer.

Truthfully, it was a team effort involving, Carol, my parents who were visiting, a car borrowed from a friend and myself (hover over photos for team names).

We parked in front of a restaurant in La Paz. Carol left the restaurant early to check on the truck. As we were paying, the person at the front of the restaurant told me there was a problem with where we were parked. I went outside and saw a line of cars with tickets on them and a police officer talking to Carol.

It turns out that the officer had ticketed everyone equally but had decided to wait in front of the car with California plates - to encourage us to "pay now". With our limited Spanish comprehension, his limited English and a lot of gesturing, he told us the ticket would cost 1000 pesos if we went to the station (most definitely a lie) but that we could pay $50USD now and he would tear up the ticket.

Carol got into the spirit of things, seeing that the position of power had altered with the officer's introduction of the topic of a bribe, and began bargaining. They agreed upon $25. When presented with the money the officer tried to reopen the bargaining for $40 but we stood firm at the agreed upon $25. This was, we figured, the price of a parking ticket back in Victoria and surely a substantial portion of his income, making it a reasonable deal for everyone.

We got some flack from a local who was upset that tourists pay the bribes because the people living them are trying to eliminate them. What she wanted us to have done was to have followed the officer to the station. I see her point but we were not interested in following the officer around town or in waiting several hours at the station to pay a substantially lesser fine. We also had a bit of gringo fear at getting any further involved with the police or visiting a police station. This, of course, the officer could have guessed as well.

More exciting than most tourist attractions, we paid $25 to ride the "Mordida Coaster". Good job Team Mordida!