Apataki to Fakarava Escorted by Squalls

Ok, we caught up on pictures, now back to general updates… 

This morning when we tried to pull up anchor, the chain didn’t come up at all. As we suspected, it was tightly wound around the coral. We had to do a lot of maneuvering of the boat to get it unwound, but we got the anchor up without having to go in and untangle it.

As we left, the water was very calm in the lagoon. Until we  Continue reading

Site Housekeeping

We added some recent questions to the end of the FAQ. We made some minor updates to other static pages. There is a new picture at the top of the Our Boat page, bonus points if you can figure out where we took that photo. We added a new category of “South Pacific” and we will be trying to tag the posts.

Floating in Outer Space at Apataki

This morning when we woke up there was no wind at all and the water was smooth as glass. The water was actually a mirror, reflecting the clouds in the sky above. On the horizon, you couldn’t see where the water ended and the sky began. Up until the last couple of days the trade winds have been very strong. We thought around here the wind never died, so the calm has been something of a surprise for us.

Manihi had no bugs that bit, so we were surprised to find that Apataki has a serious mosquito problem. They must breed in the pools of water. A few mosquito had managed to sneak aboard and just about ate us alive in our sleep. Continue reading

Apataki Search for the Village

Now that things have calmed down with our anchor rescued, we can go back to our regularly scheduled program.

Like Manihi and most other atolls, Apataki is a thin ring of land with a huge lagoon in the middle. Apataki is sort of square-ish in shape. In Manihi you could not see all the way north from the south, but you could see all the way west from the east. In Apataki, you can’t see the end in either direction. It just looks like endless ocean beyond the L of land visible and it is hard to believe there is more land so close by. Continue reading