We have sailed two days to get to Tahiti, our next stop and were greeted this morning with heavy skies and rain. It looked pretty miserable out there. As we sailed into the harbour, we could see quite a lot of flotsam in the water, and the ocean was looking brown… yes, brown! Uh-oh, this isn’t good.
Shortly after this we get a message over the PA system from the Captain telling us that the island and areas surrounding Papeete has just experienced two days of extremely heavy rainfall, that has caused severe flooding, landslides, roads washed out and houses destroyed. The Captain said they would be docking in Tahiti, but that all the ships’ tours were cancelled as the locals were dealing with the severe flooding. He would advise us if we could go ashore after discussions with local officials.
People were pretty good about this news – unlike the last time I missed a port, which was in St John’s, Canada due to a severe storm and the (primarily American) passengers grumbled and complained like you would not believe, at being told that it was unsafe to take the ship through the middle of a North Atlantic storm with 24 foot waves. On this occasion, many people went down to the cruise director asking if they could go ashore and volunteer with flood recovery efforts, which I thought was a wonderful response.
Eventually the Captain came back and told us that the French High Commission had declared a state of emergency and that the port of Papeete was closed – no crew or passengers would be allowed to leave the ship. We had supplies to load, including fuel, so the ship would be in port all day as planned, though there was one more hiccough to be navigated. We were scheduled to leave at 11:30pm, but the power station was out and the fuelling system was running on a back up generator, so instead of pumping fuel into the ship at 130 tons per hour (is that a lot? it sounds like a lot) we were taking it onboard at only 80 tons per hour and this was going delay our departure by four hours.
The long and the short of it was – we all had another sea day, in port. There were some additional hasty activities added to the schedule and many of us spent quite a lot of time up on decks looking into the town feeling pretty useless. Those of us from Brisbane were particularly sober; it was not so long ago that our own city was underwater and we know all too well how awful and dangerous flooding can be.
We went to sleep that night with the ship not rocking – which felt seriously weird after two weeks of being lulled to sleep by the rocking of the ship. I have to say, I am really liking this Captain – he kept us all informed and has been daily sharing more and more information about how the ship works and the things that are going on behind the scenes.
The next thing on our agenda is scenic cruising near Pitcairn Island (effectively another sea day with a bit of a view) and then on to Easter Island. If we don’t get into Easter Island – and we are told that barely 1 in 5 ships do, due to the weather conditions and the fact that the island has only a floating pontoon to tender to, then we may end up with 15 sea days in a row… right now we are up to our 5th sea day in a row and it already feels like a fortnight!
