As promised our bread was delivered at 8am with a jar of mango/passion fruit jam, and a request for another 80 litres of water! The bread went down very well at breakfast. Rowan had spoken to the skipper, Dan, when he delivered the full water containers to them yesterday. He is also French Swiss, he owns the boat and has lived in the Marquesas for the past 5 years. He apparently ran a bakery in New Caledonia (an island not far from Australia) for many years. The two crew who came to collect the water are paying guests, I wonder how they feel about going around begging for water! We invited them on board while we were filling the water containers, she was an absolute chatterbox, and spoke good English, the guy could not speak much, not that he got much of a chance to. They are not a couple and have just landed on the boat together, she has just retired from work as an accountant and decided to leave two days later on an adventure. She is quite a character, doesn’t sound like she has ever married, or had kids, so nobody but her elderly Mum to worry about. She spent 5 months in Cape Town studying English, in her thirties, and loves wine. She is a parasailor and showed us her horrendous scars down her back which she broke on a failed take off! She has two metal rods in her back, and is clearly living life to the full.
Around lunch time we headed off for a snorkel thinking we would go back to the most southern 3rd pass but it was too choppy and bouncy. We decided to investigate the big bommie that is in line with the second pass. It was quite bouncy but once in, it was good, although quite a lot of current so we drifted with JeldiJeldi. I find having her close by quite reassuring especially when an enormous shark arrived to investigate us. It was definitely not the black tipped reef sharks that we see loads of, Rowan thinks it was a Nurse shark. Whatever, it still gets my heart pumping a little faster! The coral was great and it was teeming with fish, so many varieties and sizes, it is difficult to absorb it all. We saw an Eagle ray too, always so graceful flapping their wings. Such a shame we did not manage to come here on the calm days, and we forgot the GoPro so no photos.
In the evening we went over to Spirit of Argo. We had a wonderful reception from Quinn who was very pleased to see us, howling in delighted and very excited about us coming on board, very cute for an old man (12 years old). The boat was built in 1979, and is clearly well looked after, loads of wood and amazingly spacious. Kane cooked us a delicious Indian meal with spicy lentils and sweet potato curry, plus home made roti. It was a very good evening and intriguing to hear how Kane was a detective in London for 20 odd years, and learnt to sail in the police force.
We returned to PolePole and spotted a big shark circling around us, they are so inquisitive!
Our payment for the water!
A beautiful sunset
Nearly a half moon
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