A few hours after leaving Tahuata, we arrived in Atuona, the main town of Hiva Oa. The bay is southeast facing and the anchorage is protected behind a breakwater, but a bit separated from town. The anchorage was quite crowded and a handful of other boats formed a wagon wheel around a large, central buoy normally used for the supply ship. We managed to tuck into a shallow spot in the bay and put out a bow and stern anchor to hold us in place. The surrounding island was beautiful but the anchorage was hot and the water was a bit too dirty to jump in and cool off. We also lacked the foresight to see that showing up on a Saturday was a horrible idea since nothing would be opened until Monday. But… here we were. Luckily we had some good 4G cell service to waste the time and managed to find a water faucet and shower onshore. Sunday afternoon, we spent the afternoon handwashing our laundry in the fresh water. Aside from some expensive laundry on Nuku Hiva, we had been washing our clothes with salt water and doing a fresh water rinse before drying. As a result, our clothes have been slowly deteriorating. Elastic bands have become very un-stretchy and my bras and Eitan’s boxers can barely hug our bodies. My sun shirts have also seemed to grow three sizes too big and hang off of me like a feed sack. Just another quirk of boat life!
While Eitan finished up the laundry, I took the first real shower I have had since Mexico. The shower facility was an open, concrete stall with some cockroaches and a cutoff pipe without a shower head to deliver the water. There was no temperature control, but it still felt truly amazing. Since we have been primarily showering with a solar shower off the back of the boat, feeling the pressurized water flowing across my head was truly incredible. I actually had enough water to fully rinse the soap from my hair and I scrubbed my skin with my luffa until it felt raw, exfoliating the dead skin dried out by so much salt water exposure.
After the weekend in Hiva Oa was over, Monday came and Eitan and I were ready to hit the ground running, checking things off the to-do list. First on the list was topping off the bottle of cooking gas, so we grabbed the tanks and headed to shore. Since there are no actual liquid gas facilities on the islands, the local boatyard will fill tanks by taking a larger, 30 kg bottle, and hanging it upside down to fill the smaller tanks that cruisers use. As fate would have it, they didn’t have the right fitting to fill our tank. This was a bit problematic because at the end of the week we were leaving for the Tuamotus, a remote island chain with even fewer services available. Running out of cooking gas was not an option. So, instead of checking a task off the to do list, Eitan added an item to figure out how to adapt one of these larger butane tanks to our system and then figure out where to put it.
Next, we started on the 40-minute walk into town, being unsuccessfully in our attempt to hitchhike. About halfway there, it started pouring rain and we waited under a tree for the squall to pass. Once we arrived in town, it was my turn to start checking things off my shopping list. Our friends on SV Tengah recommended a couple different grocery stores so I thought it best to do a walk-through through of each and shop at whichever had the most things on my list. After picking the best store, I returned only to find the doors locked! I forgot that everything closes for lunch from 12pm-3pm so I would either have to wait three hours or come back the next day. We even tried to go to the post office to buy data recharge cards for our phones but they were out to lunch as well. So, it seems we walked all the way to town, in the pouring rain, only to find everything closed!
We were a bit frustrated, but what can you do? So, we walked the 40 minutes back to the boat and decided top off our gas and diesel at the nearby gas station. We soon found out that that the gas station had run out of fuel, both gasoline and diesel, and was waiting for the fuel truck to deliver more. At this point, it was almost comical how unproductive the day had become, but we persisted. Eitan worked the rest of the day figuring out how to adapt our cooking gas setup for the new butane bottle.
We spent the rest of the week in Hiva Oa waiting on weather for the 4-day passage to the Tuamotu Archipelago. It was a rainy week and the squalls seemed to come every hour to give us a quick downpour, then clear up. It was a regular rush to close all the windows and hatches, then open them back up again 5 minutes later, once it got too hot and humid inside the boat. Luckily, the nearby boat yard had decent WIFI and we spent a couple days catching up on uploads and downloads.
Since we weren’t moving and the engine remained off, we used the generator to charge the house batteries. Eitan showed me how to set everything up, run the power cord, and start the generator. The following day, he asked me to get us charging so I got the generator set up on the deck and checked off the instructions on my phone and successfully fired it up. But, a few hours later when I went to unplug and get everything stowed, I found the power chord from the generator to the boat was almost completely melted through. I hadn’t given consideration to the direction of the exhaust from the generator, nor how hot it would be, and placed the chord in front of it. Luckily, Eitan keeps spares for almost everything!
By the end of the week, Eitan had rigged the new giant butane bottle on the transom and we managed to finally top up on fuel, food, and water. The little inconveniences and lack of productivity in Hiva Oa left a bit of a bad taste in our mouths about the Marquesas and we were ready to move on to the next island chain. After 5 weeks, we were only able to see a fraction of what we wanted to in the Marquesas and half the time we found ourselves stuck somewhere waiting out the relentless windy weather. So we finally departed Hiva Oa, returned back to Tahuata for one night to scrub the bottom, then start the 4-day passage to the Tuamotus!
