America’s Cup

0800 Position 16-29S 151-46W.  On a mooring at the Bora Bora Yacht Club

 

We made friends with a couple on another cruising boat moored here while we were in getting organized with the Bora Bora Yacht Club late in the afternoon the day before yesterday.  Jill was raised in Hobart, Rob's home town, and she and her husband Trevor, a native Kiwi, now live in New Zealand's Bay of Islands.  They just sold their home and bought a relatively new forty foot Hanse cruising boat here in Tahiti.  They are on their way home with their new toy.  They are as interested in the America's Cup as we are, so we invited them over to the boat to watch yesterday morning's races.

 

Murphy's Law works as well down here in paradise as it does at home, and during the America's Cup pre-start maneuvers the WIFI, which had worked perfectly up to that point, slowed down so badly that the Skype video wasn't working at all, and audio was only working about seventy percent of the time.  It was very frustrating, but we could still follow both races pretty well.  It was nice that Oracle finally won a race, but the Kiwis among us were gloating.  It is sure looking like the cup is going back down under.

 

We needed to figure out a better way to watch Sunday's two races, so Lori and I figured out how to do a video chat on WhatsApp on our phones.  It looked like WhatsApp would work better than Skype when the WIFI signal was poor, so our plan for this morning was to go ashore to the club house where the WIFI signal would be strongest and connect through Lori to watch the races using both Skype on my PC and WhatsApp on my phone.

 

Last night we caught a taxi in to Vaitape, Bora's main town, to see the spectacle of the Heiva, a month long party that includes singing and dancing competitions.  It looked to us like the entire population of Bora Bora was there enjoying themselves, and we also had a good time.

 

This morning the WIFI signal in the club house was a bit better than yesterday on the boat, but Skype still cut out on both audio and video a lot.  However, the WhatsApp audio and video transmission came though perfectly over the cell phone.  It was pretty comical with the six of us, four from Van Diemen and our two Kiwi friends, crowded around watching a single cell phone screen and listening intently to what little sound came out of the phone.  If you had walked into our house in Hawaii you would have seen a PC and a cell phone propped up on a stool in front of the television with the volume on the TV cranked all the way up so we could hear it over the cell phone.  Lori probably had cotton in her ears to keep from going deaf.  Many thanks to Lori for making a bunch of homesick sailors happy.

 

Our original plan was to head somewhere else today, but we need to watch tomorrow's cup race, or races if Oracle can find a way to win the first one.  So we are staying put for another day.