Hinano Tahiti

The internet is something great and wonderful where you can find everything you want to find and purchase what you want.

However, when it comes to investing in your boat of dreams, it pays handsomely to be very cautious and careful before going ahead with a purchase. And remember, that boats such as cars, often much more pleasant to a photographic image than in reality!

The following is an excerpt from my ebook 'Voyage of the little ship' Tere Moana 'and is very much a cautionary tale of a real life situation I ran into Papeete, French Polynesia.

........' At this point our team are joined by a boater Australian slowly his way back to New South Wales. They first met at Club Balboa Yacht Panama. His is an account excruciatingly painful and worth repeating here as a cautionary tale.

Some eighteen months ago he had bought a sloop, by private sale on the Internet. It has been "resting on Mystic River in Connecticut, USA. He arrived to discover that the boat was in a state far worse than he had been led to believe. He spent the winter working and living aboard in freezing conditions to prepare for the trip.

Imagine every morning with ice hanging from your mustache
having to crawl out of your bunk and down the scale, laboriously through a foot of snow on the toilet block, re-climb the ladder, and begin the workday with the fingers barely move, and the brain benumbed in sluggish cold. For an Australian raised in the heat of NSW must have been soul destroying.

During this period, he spent more on the job than he had originally paid for it. This was not part of the plan!
Then take road trip to date was a disaster after another - too many to repeat here, and too depressing to contemplate. The latest news from our crew had him here in Papeete. He came to sailing as his engine had seized completely several days out of Tahiti, and he was told the parts needed would be five weeks. He was quickly running out of funds and another three thousand nautical miles from the house.

visit him in his boat the next day, our captain and brother of the crew could not believe the appalling conditions in which it existed. The ship was dark, damp and rather cool, despite the hot sun of Tahiti. The smell of rot and mold and dry was almost unbearable and after a short discussion and looking around him many problems, our management team for the periwinkle ground for a coffee hot and sunny for obligatory Hinano. Here, his dark eyes brightened a bit like the liquid amber take effect.

A respectable time later they took their departure, waving cheerily as he disappears down the dock to his boat, presumably to look again at very many things to correct before he embarks again.

As at the time our little boat left Tahiti, the parts had not arrived yet and he has never heard of him - he had a VHF radio on board, but was ineffective at best.

From time to time his name came into the conversation as to its progress and location, but having no means of communication, our team can only guess what and where.

Since there are no reports of vessels wrecked or disappeared over the next six months they could not suppose it has finally made him to return to Australia - a prayer that goes to "one who makes us, for the safety of mariners at sea, would be beyond his name on the list.

Excerpt from my ebook 'Voyage of the little ship "Tere Moana

The moral of this story is never part with any money on the internet for any ship before an inspection by yourself and also preferably by a surveyor authorized navy. If you go cruising offshore.