Steve's Birthday Party -- Polynesian Style

One of the most enjoyable aspects of cruising (or just being retired) is not having to adhere to a strict schedule. I remember when I had to account for every six minutes of my day for billable hours. Never again. Now, as cruisers say, “Our plans are written in the sand.”  

Wandering through Marina Tiana, we ran into Steve from LiWard. It was his 64th birthday and his wife LiLi had scheduled a big party for him that night on the dock. We had first met Steve and LiLi in Huahine when he was singing at the Huahine Yacht Club and knew that any party he had was going to be a wingding. 

The beautiful LiWard, a Hans Christian 48.

One of the curious things about cruising is we first meet each other wearing t-shirts and flip-flops and have no inkling about each other’s professional backgrounds (sometimes for years). Turns our Steve was a chemical engineer with Shell and LiLi was a dyed-in-the-wool rocket scientist (specializing in propulsion systems) for NASA. Steve quipped that LiLi was the only women he knew who could spell and pronounce monomethylhydrazine (a component of rocket fuel) correctly.

Steve plays professional gigs in various venues throughout French Polynesia, and for the birthday party he set up his speakers, mics, and amp on the dock near their boat. He performs everything from Jimmy Buffet to the Stones and really gets the crowd rocking. 

As the night lingered, more and more people showed up for the party.

Steve and the incredible Kemo, with his Dad holding his iPhone with the lyrics to the song.

Beauties on the dock:  Meryl, Brigette from Pitfa, and LiLi from Liward.

The party started off with three or four couples, then more and more cruisers — mostly French — started showing up. Lots of beer and pizza followed as the crowd grew. Steve had just met a 17-year-old Tahitian named Kemo earlier that day and asked him if he’d like to perform with him. Kemo showed up with his guitar and his entourage:  his father and his sister. He played several sets by himself and several with Steve and mesmerized the crowd with his melodic voice, a cross between Cat Stevens and Stevie Wonder.   He absolutely killed Eric Clapton's "Tears in Heaven." The crowd was spellbound. Listening to he and Steve harmonizing together was a real treat. As I said, Steve always throws a great party.

The rest of our week at Marina Tiana was a combination of taking the bus up to Papeete for shopping trips and getting boat projects completed. Meryl had gotten some nice black pearls from a lady in the Tuamotus and finally found a jeweler in Papeete to set them as earrings. She’s still looking for a silver necklace for a beautiful large teardrop black pearl she got from the same lady.

The freon goes in, the freon goes out.

We also decided to get our refrigerator looked at while we were at Marina Tiana, since that’s where all the marine techs hang out. To make a very long and complicated story short, the French refrigeration guy we’d worked with before was busy working on a super yacht, so he recommended another guy. Unfortunately, this guy spoke very little English and had never worked on our type of refrigeration. He ended up overfilling the unit with refrigeration gas which caused the thermostats to quit working (since the over pressure sensor showed too much pressure in the system).

Over the next week I slowly bled gas out of the system to try and get it back into equilibrium, but with little success. Ironically the fridge got the coldest we’d ever seen it, but with no working thermostat we had to shut it off by hand. We later had another fridge guy work on it, but this time some wires to the thermostat got loose and I’m not sure he got them back in the right order. He thinks it may be a relay so a third tech (who naturally is leaving for Canada for the next month) will pick up some relays back home and we’ll see if that was the problem.

Now we have a fridge and freezer at essentially the same temps so Meryl is having to be creative as to where she stores her veggies so they don’t freeze.  If I ever go on an extended sailboat trip again I want to get my mechanical/electrical/structural engineering degrees ahead of time so I can fix all this stuff. At least now I know a little more about how refrigeration units work, but not enough to get it fixed correctly.

Cruising would be the absolutely perfect lifestyle if you didn’t have to spend so much time keeping the boat alive. If you are an engineer who loves fixing things, it’s nirvana.