Commodore
July 10, 2025

Friday 11 July – amazing white beach anchorage

It was pretty dark when we got up at 5:30am to get over the coral at high tide at 6am.

Lela, the American cat that we met yesterday asked if they could follow us out as they hit coral on the way in, luckily they have retractable rudders, which just got bumped up. We retraced our track out faithfully, we all made it out ok, and headed north. Sadly there was no wind at all, so we had to motor the whole way.

After our early start we got to our anchorage mid morning, the water was the the most dazzling blue we have seen so far, the beaches are powder white sand. It took us a while to find an area without any bommies, crossing over coral to get to our final spot. Thankfully we got the anchor in the middle of a sandy patch where we can rotate 360 degrees without hitting anything. Such a relief. Lela has electric engines, so they were going pretty slowly to conserve power, they took a good few hours longer than us to arrive.

We headed to the beach to go for a walk and found the remains of WW2 landing craft, quite bizarre. Of course we landed walking in the midday heat, it was boiling hot, with not much shade on the road, a couple of kms to the village was enough. School had just finished for the kids, they were very sweet, polite and friendly. We stopped at one point to look at the rocky coastline and saw a young boy collecting fresh water from a spring bubbling up through the limestone. It was a heavy bucket so Rowan carried it for him up the slope to his house, very sweetly he thanked Rowan profusely and then said ‘love you’! The village had an impressive sports field, but otherwise looked very quiet in the midday sun.

We walked back and stopped at the Eco-resort that we are anchored in front of. It is run by locals and everything looks a little tired and empty, but we decided to go back for supper. We landed up having a delicious freshly cooked green chicken curry on noodles with fresh vegetables. Definitely one of the best meals we have had. The old boy who runs the place came and chatted to us. So sad, he says tourism has died a death, before Covid at this time of year, peak season, he would be full to busting and turning people away, now he has two bungalows occupied and only one other table of guests at the restaurant. Covid followed by the earthquake and the national airline going bust has killed tourism. The other table turned out to be an English guy married to an Australian, they had flown over for a two week holiday with their two kids. He played semi professional rugby in the UK in his youth, and now his daughter 13 has just won a scholarship to a rugby playing boarding school somewhere in Australia. They were having such fun as a family, playing cards and loads of banter, it was fun to see.