Tuesday June 5, 2007 Manihi: 14-28 S by 146-02 W. First thing this morning some divers came and freed the two trapped sail boats. The third boat also pulled up anchor and left, leaving Kosmos alone in the anchorage. The dive shop is located on the hotel grounds, and Richard caught a ride with the divers back to the hotel. He decided to spend his last couple nights in the lap of luxury. So now it is just the two of us in this super romantic setting. Nice.

This afternoon we went into town. The main town on the island is called Paeua and it is on the south side. While the land consists of a ring around a lagoon, there are breaks in the land that naturally separate one town from another. Here you need a boat to get around the island, and we have seen what look to be public transportation boats. We are guessing Paeua is a couple miles long and about a quarter mile wide. Paeua ends on the west side at the channel entrance and at the east side near where we are anchored, where the land is too low to build on.

The island has about 500 people, and it seems most of them live in Paeua. There is one main road, with little side roads lined with houses. The roads are unpaved, and are white with chunks of shells and coral embedded into the ground. We’ve never seen a white road before. The land is densely populated with small homes with metal roofs on small lots situated close to one another. Much to our surprise, almost every yard was fenced in. There are two markets and they are stocked almost as well as the ones in Taiohae (one of the stores even has five flavors of Tim Tams! Yes!). There is a church, a soccer field, and a cemetery. The cemetery has no fence, and we saw some dog dung on the graves. That was weird. A message about how well the dog liked that person? We saw a scooter, two trucks, lots of bikes, and a whole bunch of hard bottomed dinghies. They have lots of boat parking around town that is for sure.

Other than the trip into town, we spent the majority of the day puttering around the boat. Despite a good night of sleep, we were out of it and moving slow, still not fully recuperated from that last rough passage. Eric changed the oil and filter on the generator. Christi did the usual post-passage cleaning and organizing. We enjoyed a spectacular sunset and sat outside for a while after dark, taking in the amazingly bright stars in the sky before the moon rose.

On a side note, Eric noticed we were using more electricity than normal the last couple days. After dark, he noticed that there was a light coming from the anchor locker. Somehow, the light switch had gotten turned on when we anchored and had run for the last two days (we hope not more). For the engine room lights there is an indicator they are on, but not for the anchor locker, or for the lazarette. They might be good indicators to add. Anyway, lights burn a lot of juice.