Tuesday 30 September – three South African boats in the atoll

Silum arrived just before breakfast with 4 enormous coconut crabs. He joined us for breakfast, very difficult to get much response from him at times, he ate breakfast while hooked onto his phone with our wifi! With a little guidance from Silum, Rowan spent most of the morning cooking the crabs, one at a time as our biggest pot only fits a single crab. Then he had to strip out the body flesh and the brown meat.

Months ago when Rowan put on one of our WhatsApp sailing groups that we were looking for any boats doing the same route as us, Gary Meyer responded they were doing our route at roughly the same time. Then when we were leaving Vanuatu Gary had to return to Australia with knee problems. I said to Rowan at the time it sounded like a South African name. He contacted us a few weeks ago to say they were heading this way quickly. Rowan established he is South African, he emigrated to Australia in the late 80’s and has married Kim an Australian. Mid morning Rowan got a call to say they were coming in the pass. They anchored between Profasea and ourselves and were settled by midday. We invited them and Claudette to supper, to feast on the crabs.

We planned to go for a snorkel at 2pm, a huge squall arrived bringing rain which we haven’t seen in a while. I opted out of the snorkel in the end as it did not look great conditions and my ear is not 100%. Silum and Claudette joined Rowan and went over the reef to the drop off where they had a wonderful snorkel on great coral, and saw loads of fish, plenty of big ones too and lots of turtles. I will definitely go out tomorrow, the visibility was fantastic too.

We had a great dinner with the new boat called Arka and Claudette. The crabs were delicious. Silum had brought us some dried coconuts, so Rowan got the flesh out and I whizzed it up with coconut water, lime and seasoning to have with the crab. It was delicious, amazingly the brown meat in the fridge had a layer of what looked like solidified butter on it, which must have been the coconut they eat, Gary and Kim said they have had these crabs before and use the brown meat like pate. The claws and legs were enormous, so it was a very drawn out meal with plenty of wine and catching up on a lot of South African stories. Poor Kim being the only non S African, but she coped no problem. They have sailed a lot, and spent 6 years sailing when they first got married and had their first child on board while in Yemen in the early 90’s, she flew home for the actual delivery. They stopped sailing while the kids grew up and now are back on a sailing adventure. Kim had brought a chicken Thai curry and Claudette brought sides, so we were absolutely stuffed by the end of the evening. Great fun to be socialising and meeting new people again.

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