When I was a little kid we used to watch Wild Kingdom with Marlin Perkins on television. He would explore the mysteries of deepest darkest Africa, and I remember one of those mysteries being the mythical elephant graveyard where elephants would go to die.
A similar mystery exists today. We keep building more and more fiberglass boats. There are only a finite number of places to keep them though. Where do the old ones go to die? Well, we believe we’ve found the elephant graveyard for fiberglass boats. It’s right here in Port Phaeton. This place is full of derelict fiberglass and aluminum boats, many of which do not look like they’ve been touched in years. There are even a few that have sunk in the shallows and are partially exposed above the water’s surface.
We went ashore this morning to explore the nearby marina and drydocking facility. It too was full of boats worth less than $1,000. Many of the boats on the hard look like they have been there for many years.
Other than being surrounded by derelicts, Port Phaeton was a very pleasant anchorage. A couple of us were buzzed by mosquitoes during the night, but the cool breeze flowing down from the mountains of Tahiti Nui made for great sleeping.
We weighed anchor after our walk around the boat yard and headed for Papeete. There wasn’t much wind, so we powered west just outside the reef. Papeete is the big city, and a busy place. The port is so busy that you need to request clearance on the VHF radio to enter the harbor. We did that, got approval, and entered just as a high speed ferry was departing for Moorea. Once in the harbor we headed left for the Papeete Marina, a new secure marina right in the heart of town. I recall there being plenty of empty slips there when I was here in 2014, and the marina manager directed us to a great slip when we called him yesterday on the VHF. At 3PM we were secured and ready to check out the town.
The first order of business was finding WIFI. Free WIFI comes with the slip, but we were told it was temporarily disabled. A nice gal on one of the boats near us told us about free WIFI at a brew pub. I recall having an excellent beer at a downtown brew pub with my daughter Kara in 2011, so Bill and I headed there. That was the spot. The beer is still excellent, the WIFI is free, and the smell of barley and hops from the brewing process was heavenly.
One of Papeete’s favorite attractions is the roulettes, the dozen or so food trucks that mass every evening on the waterfront about a block from the marina. You can get everything imaginable there, pizza, Chinese, steak, crepes, fish, etc. We all headed over there for dinner last night and it was great. We will likely be there again tonight.
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