Sailing the South Seas – Part 3

All Aboard

We weren’t always cruising people. For a few decades, we enjoyed planning our own trips, months and years in advance and then travelling to places on our own agenda. Trips to Australia and Italy last year were both self-planned and we loved both of them. So what’s with all the cruising we’ve been doing? We’re on our third cruise since late 2024 and a fourth later this year. I suspect that we’ll continue to cruise over the years but I miss those trips where we can make a deeper dive into a single country.

Junk Science or Genius?

It’s ironic that for all the cruising we’ve done lately, Barb and I have know for a long time that we don’t handle rough seas very well. We used to buy the patches that go behind your ear to prevent seasickness until they stopped being sold in Canada. For a while Barb had a black market source out of the U.S. (I like calling it a black market source, really just a friend of a friend). But we knew that we needed to find a long term solution. On the advice of another friend, Barb came home with these devices we wear on our wrist and have a small battery that keeps emitting some kind of voltage onto your skin. On the surface, this sounded like some late night informercial product that made wild claims using junk pseudoscience. Nonetheless, I was willing to try it.

I can’t vouch for the science behind this but it absolutely works. We don’t wear it all the time, only when there are rough seas and if they didn’t work we would definitely know about it as we’d both be scrambling for the black market patches.

The Islands

I learned that I was using the wrong names of the islands we’ve been to so far, saying that “Tahiti” was the name that also belonged to the islands of Moorea and Bora Bora. We were corrected that Tahiti is just the one island we flew into and all the islands belonging to French Polynesia.

We were at Bora Bora yesterday and similar to Moorea, has stunning, jagged mountains. We rented a taxi to take us all around Bora Bora, stopping at many spots. Not only are the mountains like a postcard, the turquoise colour of the water at the beaches are almost unreal.

As we left Bora Bora yesterday, we officially left the French Polynesia part of the cruise. Today is Sunday, and we have a full day at sea as we head towards the Cook Islands. The weather, since we arrived in Tahiti a week ago has been sunny and warm every day. I’m in shorts and sandals quite a bit of the time. We’re moving from one paradise location to another.

As I mentioned in Part 1, Barb and I visited one of the Cook Islands back in 1999, spending a week on the main island of Rarotonga, so it will be interesting to see how much it has changed, if at all.

I’ve continued to upload my photos from our south seas trip, on my photo website here.

Baden