Tomorrow is Isabel’s birthday. Happy birthday Isabel! Send her a short note! WDG9444@SAILMAIL.COM (case sensitive). No emojis, no attachments – won’t get through. I’d buy her something for her big day, but there’s nothing here to buy.
Spending while cruising is weird. We left Nuku Hiva over 6 weeks ago and until Monday didn’t spend a nickle. Well not entirely true, as we have some automatic debits from our checking account and credit card (love those points), but honestly. We spent a bunch of money to provision for a couple of months before leaving Nuku Hiva, and we finally got to buy some groceries on Monday. Raroia has a tiny shop to support the 187 local inhabitants plus the punters that sail into the atoll.
Glad we brought a pile of cash, because there isn’t an ATM on this atoll. No bank either. The local post office also serves as a bank for locals, but don’t go in there expecting to cash a check. This situation helped us realize how difficult it can be to buy stuff if one doesn’t carry cash.
Other cruisers here without enough cash on hand tried to use Transferwise to send money to the shop keepers account. Didn’t work, money was returned. Kiwis succeeded by using XE.COM. Sounded good – I created an account on XE.COM yesterday just to discover that they can’t transfer money from a US bank account to a French Polynesian bank account. US banking regulations make life hard sometimes.
We’re hoping to engage the services of a “personal shopper service”, a lady in Tahiti who we can email our grocery list to, then she’ll run around to all the stores to buy stuff, package it all up and take it to the supply ship, pay the transportation fee, then bill us for the total. She’ll trust that we’ll pay. As we like to know we can pay our obligations, we’re trying to find a way to transfer money from our account to hers. So far, no way we can do it from our account, but our pal Angus in Strasbourg does business with several French banks and may be able to help.
So now we’re doing this silly kabuki dance to see if Angus can transfer a single Euro from his bank to the shopper lady’s bank. If that works, we’ll see if he can do the same to the local shop keeper’s post office bank account. If successful we’re golden and we’ll just PayPal Angus money for groceries and he’ll do his thing to transfer money within the French / French Polynesia banking system. Angus is a great guy – one of Isabel’s old boyfriends, sailing pals, whatever, and welcome in our tiny floating home anytime.
Internet access is spotty out here, and bandwidth so poor that often it’s impossible to login to a bank website. The connection is so slow that the website security won’t play ball. We’ve taken to putting a large credit on our charge card account so we never pay a late fee if we can’t login for a couple of months. We make sure there’s plenty of green in our checking account so the automatic debits for health insurance and such are properly funded for several months.
It all takes a bit of thinking and planning ahead to keep the bills paid so that Spotify and Google Fi and Predictwind continue working month after month. In the meantime, except for groceries and a little fuel, we’re not spending anything. That’ll change if we ever make it to Tahiti and go for the big provisioning trip at Carrefour and other vendors, and of course we’ll have to drink some overpriced craft beer at Les Trois Brasseurs in Papeete. It’ll really change if we make it to New Zealand and haul out for bottom paint – a few thousand bucks will disappear in a flash.
Out here an annual budget makes sense, but a monthly budget is useless. We either can’t spend anything or we’re spending like drunken sailors. That is, if we can figure out how to put our money in someone else’s hands. Maybe they’ll let us sail to Makemo next week – there’s a bank machine there!
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