The Taporo 8 finally arrived on Wednesday morning March 3rd, originally scheduled for February 26th. The ship’s website doesn’t update the arrival date, but they do maintain a Facebook page and do so there. Interesting how Facebook does have a lot of utility value for so many different interest groups, but that’s another topic for another time. On this ship was our shipment from the USA, including boat parts, a replacement SUP, an inflatable kayak, goodies from Trader Joe’s, and various clothing items such as Croc sandals and flip flops. Crocs are the only sensible choice for tropical footwear, but again, that’s another topic of conversation. Of great interest to us in this shipment was a laundry spinner and a single burner inductive cooktop, major upgrades to our laundry and cooking activities. For the first time ever, we had ordered a small load of groceries from SIPAC, the distributor in Papeete that many local folks use to purchase comestibles. SIPAC has a website that’s pretty basic, but once you’ve picked out all the foodstuffs you desire you designate which ship and island to deliver to, pay by credit card, and SIPAC does the rest.
The Taporo 8 tied up to the freight dock around 0830, and by 1030 they had set their little office on the dock and the line of folks waiting to receive goods or arrange shipment had grown quite large. Our strategy was to monitor the situation and at some point Isabel would get in line while I did boat projects and waited for her radio call. Outside the office was a basket full of paperwork, and we finally determined that the drill was to sift through the contents and find our own paperwork for both SIPAC orders and other shipment. All very informal and no explanation on a sign or anything, but with Isabel’s excellent French and willingness to ask the local honey man, plus a bit of encouragement from Karla off SV Ari B, we soon had our documents in hand. While this was going on, 20’ shipping containers were unloaded from the boat and placed in a line, some of them refrigerated units. Soon the ship’s staff had the unrefrigerated containers open and folks gathered around as boxes of groceries were removed and presented. Isabel scored our dry goods pretty early on. Next up were the refrigerated goods, and finally the frozen goods. It took a couple more hours before that process was complete. The scene on the dock was nuts – ship cranes unloading containers and crates, forklifts zooming around, pickup trucks filling, departing, returning. At one point a fight broke out between a couple of local guys – apparently exchanging jocularities got a bit out of hand.
Remarkably, we had all our groceries in hand by early afternoon, nothing missing. As Isabel had done dock duty for much of the day, I took over to collect the freight shipment from the USA, a total of 33 packages included at a bit over a cubic meter. Four different boats had collaborated to order up a 25 kg sack of flour each (they must really be into baking bread, cake and cookies). Turned out the $7/sack subsidized stuff was unavailable so they had to fork out $30 per sack. As luck would have it, we all hung around the dock until darn near dark, watching as pallets of cement blocks and other building materials along with pallets of grocery store goods were unloaded, and about the last thing to come off the ship was the flour. Within minutes the crane produced our pallet of mostly Amazon boxes, and I radioed Brian from SV Sea Rose and Alex from Ari B for assistance. Soon we had all the boxes aboard JollyDogs where Isabel and Karla had been sampling Karla’s homemade raspberry gin. They were in a jolly good mood, so Alex and I decided to join them – me for a taste of Karla’s creation, Alex for an ice cold Hinano. We stared at the mountain of boxes in the cockpit and regaled one another with tales of the day.
Just another exciting day in the life of cruisers. . .
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