I’m over in Bora Bora now. I’ve been here for 2 nights. I spent the first night over at the moorings in front of Bloody Mary’s Restaurant. It’s considered somewhat of an institution down here. Margie and I hung out there last year when we took the cruise on the Tahitian Princess. Dosia’s motor was being overhauled in Tahiti and it was cheaper to take a cruise than to get a room and stay there. Anyways, I figured I’d visit again and have a few beers. It’s an interesting place with a sand floor, a shoe check at the door, and the bathrooms resemble some sort of water-garden orgy. The only thing I’ve actually eaten at Bloodys was last year when Margie and I put in for an order of wings at $18 and got four, yes four whole chicken wings. Our friends Matt and Alicja ordered the kabobs at the same price and got a good laugh when one little kabob arrived on the plate. They lay out a huge spread of fresh seafood near the door and the patrons are brought up from the tables to order their cuts right off the ice. A lot of guests eat there as part of the package tour, some come from a cruise ship visiting the lagoon, others just show up. Regardless of how they find it, the reviews of the food at Bloody Marys are usually less than stellar so I’ll let those with the “vacation dollars” in hand partake in the eating and I’ll partake in the relatively cheap beer.
The next morning I moved over to the moorings in front of the Bora Bora Yacht Club and got a bunch of odd jobs done. Every project takes forever cause I’m suffering from CRAFTs disease (Can’t Remember a Flipping Thing). I don’t know what I was thinking when I last reorganized the boat but I must have been intoxicated. I put tools and parts in places I can’t fathom so I spend twenty minutes looking for things just to start a particular job. Last year, the problems that left us sailing 1500 miles without an engine eventually spawned a major overhaul including the purchase of a new bottom end. If you don’t know what that is, visualize a motor as a big cardboard box, cut off the bottom two-thirds of it, and replace it. It was no small job but Harvé and Pascal at Ocean Carenage did quick change out with a used Perkins 4-108 they happened to have laying around. So now I have a Perkins 4-108 bottom-end with a Westerbeke W40 (essentially a Perkins 4-107) top-end. It’s an interesting mix but it seems to work and that’s what matters in this part of the world. Without an engine, the reef passes are scary especially when they are in the lee of a mountainous island like the situation we ran into in Ua Pou. Just ask Margie about the bag she packed to jump overboard with as we “sailed into” that harbor last year. So anyways, I had a little work to do on the engine to calibrate the new parts with my existing gauges and it took most of the first day here.
Last night I headed over to the Yacht Club to check it out and have a few beers. As far as real estate goes, this place blows Bloody Mary’s out of the water…literally. The thatched roof, the deck that stretches out over the reef, the attached over-water bungalows, it’s the quinessential South Pacific scene. Once again, I wasn’t there to eat but I can tell you the kitchen smells spectacular. The new owner, Teiva is a well-trained chef who worked at some famous restaurant in California. He and his wife Jessica live in one of the attached bungalows with their kid. They are working to turn the bad reputation of the BBYC into a shiny new future and it looks like it’s working. I wish them the best of luck.
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