Thursday 18 September – back to Kavieng after a great snorkel

This is Grant and Judith’s last day, they head to the Philippines tomorrow for a week of exploring. We headed out for a good long snorkel on the reef we did the day we arrived here, we just started a little further out. We had a fantastic snorkel, the fish life was fantastic, huge schools of different fish, all so exotically coloured. I’m sure we saw a couple more fish we have not seen before. We also had a shark trailing us round in circles. A little one to start with but the then a much bigger one arrived, just a reef shark cruising. The coral was in great condition even if it was damaged in patches, with a big variety of corals. The amazing sight was a purple piece of coral with some soft coral inside with bright orange clown fish darting around.Rowan took a great video of it. Videos are not sent out on the emails, so if you want to see it, log onto the website. It was a very successful last dive with Grant and Judith.

We pretty promptly headed into Kavieng as we were booked for our fuel delivery at 3:30pm, we check out of PNG tomorrow, so this is our last fuel stop until we get to Biak, about 800 miles away. It is a ropey old fisheries dock that we were tying up to, so it required some skilful manoeuvring on Rowan’s part, luckily all went to plan. Claudette was on the dock to help catch the ropes, she had borrowed our jerry cans to fuel her boat, she does it manually rather than going to the dock. We take on a lot more fuel than her. We arrived about an hour early, which was hard work as it was baking hot on the dockside. Finally the truck arrived with the two big drums of diesel we had ordered. It was a slow process as the guy has to hand pump the fuel out the drum, and then we have a filter it has to go through. We got there in the end, tanks and jerry cans full, no wind so easy enough to depart the dock.

We went back to our anchorage outside Nusa Resort where we had picked Judy and Grant up. We had dinner at the resort which was very enjoyable, a good send off for our guests.