Blog

 It took us 20 minutes to carefully fuel up. The tricky part was filling the port gas tank. Since we only had one engine, we decided that we would run the gas hose across the top of the boat and over the opposite side. This was the first time we had attempted such a maneuver. Usually we would just turn the boat around. After only a few minutes of doing this Dailin’s hand started to cramp up from hanging over the side of the boat to fill up. That’s when we decided to pull the kayak down. Dailin and Jaeden stood on the floating kayak to the side of the boat and proceeded to finish up the fueling of our sailboat.

As we pulled the kayak back onto the boat, we could see an oily film on the bottom of the boat. We had to wipe it down in order to get the oil off of the boat that had obviously got there from the many people who had spilled fuel into the water at the dock. It was exactly 5:30 pm when I finalized paying for our duty free fuel and the attendants were happy to have finally finished their work for the day. The windows were already closed and the pumps turned off by the time I headed out the door.

As we were about to pull away from the dock and head to the dock in town, one of the kids spotted a light blue colour in the water. It was a 4 foot long octopus and it was sliding along the bottom of the ocean floor parallel to the fuel dock. The kids all scrambled off of the boat and hung their heads over the side of the dock to look at this blue octopus. It crawled over to the rocks on the shore. That’s when Dailin decided that he would put his foot into the water. Of course the octopus grabbed onto his foot and stuck there until a startled Dailin kicked into the air to send the octopus splashing into the water.

All of a sudden the octopus changed colour to a grey colour that blended in with the rocks. The water was clear however and the kids could see it crawling along the ocean floor. Jaeden, the jealous adventurer that he is decided he wanted to know what it was like to have an octopus on his foot and so he climbed down the rocks and stuck his foot in the water in front of the creature. The reaction was the same. The octopus grabbed on, Jaeden was startled and the octopus went flying into the water again. I think the sea-creature was tired of the game because this is when he decided to retreat to the darkness under the dock. The kids however were excited for yet another cool experience in Polynesia.