Our pal Kris from SV Taipan is a bit torqued at me for falling behind on my blog post. I imagine she’ll be non-plussed by my excuse, but things went South and I’ve felt a bit lethargic. But as they say, all bad things come to an end.
Our passage from Gambier to Nuku Hiva took just under 5 ½ days, 905.5 nautical miles with an average of 7.0 knots and a max speed over ground of 14.0 knots. Our first 24 hours we averaged 7.4 knots, posting a 178.8 nm day. Not our best numbers for a 24 hour period, but certainly our best run over 900+ miles. It was a stellar sail, with the true wind and seas always aft of the beam, and the apparent wind occasionally wandering forward of the beam. The seas got as big as 2.5 meters and at times it was a bit rough and noisy. We had set the single point slab reefing for #2 and #3 in case we encountered big wind, but we never had to consider #3 which is for this boat a 30+ knot wind setting. We sailed the first 27 hours with all the main out, then reefed to #2 as a squall approached and we kept that sail plan for about 1 ½ days before I got on the cabin top and manually lashed reef #1. That remained in for another 2 days or so, then on Monday the 29th we let it all hang out again. We arrived Nuku Hiva’s Taiohae Bay and had the hook down in 50+ feet of water about 2200 local time. Neither of us felt well, but we toasted our arrival with our best T Rum and crashed for the night. Tuesday we spent a quiet day resting up from the passage, but by Wednesday morning I was coughing up blood so off to the hospital we went.
This is the kind of trip where we would generally fish all day every day, but neither of us felt up to wrestling a fish onto the boat or dealing with gutting or butchering the bugger. For us, that’s pretty sick.
The good doctor in Gambier had decided I had bronchitis as all the symptoms he could examine pointed that way. Couldn’t hear anything untoward in my lungs. Gave me a 4-day course of antibiotics and I did improve quite a lot, so he sent me on my way. When we went to the hospital at Nuku Hiva I had a little difficulty walking up the gentle hill to get there. Once checked in the doctor looked at my jar of coughed up blood, had a good listen to my lungs, then ordered an X-ray. Turns out I had pneumonia, but like the doctor in Gambier, she couldn’t hear it with a stethoscope. She put me on an 8-day course of the same amoxicillin antibiotic as the previous doc, noting he should have issued me 8 days instead of 4. In any case, we had to walk to the pharmacy to collect the script, and we even managed to get lost and walk a long way up the wrong hill, so by the time we had completed our journey and returned to the boat we had walked over 4 miles. I was beat.
Over the following week I took my drugs and didn’t get much of anything done, and Isabel worked through what she had decided was a sinus infection. Honestly, we never get sick! Whatever we caught in Gambier was some really nasty stuff. I can honestly say I can’t recommend pneumonia – it left me thinking, “anything worse, just shoot me”.
Did I mention that a covid test here cost about $170 if you need to document your status before sailing to another country? Turns out if you show up at the hospital with a certain set of symptoms they give you not 1 but 2 covid tests, sticking that icky swab waaaaaay up into your sinuses on each side, then they repeat it all again. One swab gets analyzed immediately, the other goes by the next flight to Tahiti for cross check. Good news! No covid in me! Even better news – if the test is mandated by the doctor, there’s no charge. My entire bill when we departed the hospital, having just spent about a half hour with the doc, had a chest X-ray which is now in the chart table, and enjoyed 2 covid tests was about $42. The script cost about $22 to fill.
What can I say? Vive la France!
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