First thing this morning, John, the caretaker, called and asked us if we would like some fresh fish they had just caught. We said “sure” and headed over to shore. They gave us a ziplock bag containing enough fish for two dinners for us. There was tuna, rainbow fish, and something else. Much to Christi’s delight, the fish was filleted. Continue reading
This morning we woke up to 18 knot winds, swells in the normally flat lagoon, and overcast skies. We were going diving with Martin and Ginger, and we were a little nervous. Except for the “Spaghetti” dive, we have not dived without a dive master. Eric got the inflatable dinghy ready. As the four of us were leaving for the dive site, Giles called over to us that his anchor was stuck. Martin hopped in snorkel gear and thankfully with a couple strategic tugs on the chain had Giles’ boat freed in a couple of minutes. Continue reading
(continuation of the day we arrived in Suwarrow) We were excited to be on land and decided to walk around the island. Like the Tuomotus, some of the shoreline was dark, jagged lava rock, some was rocky broken coral and shells. There were a few small stretches of white sand with the small bits of shell and coral. The foliage was thick and went all the way to the edge of the water in a lot of spots. We spent most of our time walking in the water, sometimes as deep as Christi’s mid-thigh.
13.14.9S by 163.6.5W – When we first planned our itinerary, after leaving French Polynesia we were going to go to a couple of islands in the Cook Island chain that were literally right on the way. When we started researching the islands, we found that none of them had decent places to anchor the boat. If we wanted to go to the Cook’s, we would have to go to islands farther north or south, both of which were out of our way. So, the revised plan was to skip the Cook’s altogether and go straight to Niue. But several cruisers told us that we really should not miss Suwarrow. Everyone had such good things to say about Suwarrow that we added it to the itinerary, even though it is a two hundred mile (round trip) detour off our route. Continue reading
We had a decent passage from Bora Bora to Suwarrow with seas at a rocky 6 feet when we left, working and slowly mellowing out a little each day to nice 3 foot seas by the last day. Up until that last day we were running at 1600-1700 rpm and doing about 6.4 knots. The last day the wind and current both picked up in our favor and we had to slow down to 1400 rpm to keep our speed at 6.4 knots. Why slow down? So we could arrive at daylight in Suwarrow. Continue reading
