Commodore
May 9, 2023

Tuesday 9 May – Eggs at last!

Firstly if you’re interested (which I know Han and Phoebs will be) I have just downloaded a few of Rowan’s great Go Pro videos from our snorkelling, onto Sunday’s blog!

Rowan was up at 5:30am as he had read that the shops open at 6am. He wanted to be first in queue for the ship’s supplies. He rushed off in JeldiJeldi kindly leaving me slumbering and was back pretty quickly. Wrong supply ship!! However they did have local eggs, bread and bacon, so breakfast was looking up.

We did not want to hang about as we needed to fill up with Fuel, so by 8am the anchor was up with Rowan only having to dive down once to check how to get off our coral head, that we were half wrapped around. We nailed the fuel dock, so much easier in calm conditions, it is boiling hot and no wind. I went to go the supermarket at the fuel dock to get milk and tonic waters, all the heavy stuff as we were so nearby. What a wonderful surprise to find fresh produce here, it seems like the supermarkets all use different supply ships. I stocked up on fruit, and some veggies, the lettuce was way to manky to buy at these huge inflated prices. I got the last two tomatoes, it was all a bit of a bun fight and a big queue with all us cruisers. I finally got in the queue, and the petite lady in front of me turned out to be a South African lady sailing solo, who was talking to Paulina who had helped us onto the mooring ball in South Fakarava. The South African lady very kindly gave me six tomatoes when she heard me tell Rowan I had got the last two. This lady is married to an American Professor who doesn’t do passages, so she does them alone, and he flies out every now and then to meet her!. Their boat is called Prof-a-sea (Prophecy! – so American). It was a very successful shop, including tonic waters and a nice looking rack of lamb from NZ. Great relief we could hog the fuel dock for so long, nobody was waiting, so we could get rid of all our rubbish too. So good they do great recycling here.

Once loaded up we headed off to the anchorage at the North pass which is only half an hour away. Last time we came past here there were over 15 boats, now there are only two and happily we were able to pick up a mooring ball that Rowan had read about. They have two for some reason. It was rather comforting knowing we were not going to snag on coral. Rowan dived down to check on the mooring ball and it looked great which is very reassuring as we have heard a few horror stories, of mooring balls breaking loose.

We went for a great drift snorkel with JeldiJeldi midday in the pass, the current was so strong we had to get back into JeldiJeldi and did it 3 times, we were whizzing along so fast. The coral looked good to me just complete blankets of it, but it was all quite deep so not that ideal for seeing the fish. We did see some big barracuda and only one reef shark. We went to the beach near where we were anchored and snorkelled around there, the coral was pretty damaged, but good fish. The highlight was coming around a corner to find a huge Moray eel, his head as big as mine, and body the size of my leg. He came right out to investigate us initially which rather scared me as the current was pushing us towards him, poor Rowan I was clinging on behind him, not making it easy for him to get out the way. Rowan’s GoPro has a long arm which he could get close to the eel and has some very good footage. We were absolutely gobsmacked to swim about 10 meters on and find another one. Maybe husband and wife?

We finally went for a lovely walk along the beach, such beautiful clear water and great shadows in the water.

This is Fakarava atoll on Google maps, bottom left you can see the tiny South pass we came through, bottom right corner is Harifa where we stayed for the Wing Foiling. Top right corner is Rotoava the town of North Fakarava where the fuel and supermarkets are. Our blue dot is at the anchorage at the North pass

Close up of anchorage at the North Pass, 28 degrees at night

We had a very late breakfast at the North pass anchorage. I went and gave some bacon bits and crumbs to the fish and had instant success, so we fed them a bit more bread