We had another storm in the night but much calmer than the previous night, the wind didn’t get much over 20 knots and the lightening wasn’t so close by, but lots of heavy rain which has done a good job of making the boat squeaky clean. When we looked across to the other side of the atoll this morning, a couple of miles away, we could see white spray from breaking waves about 15m in the air. Initially Rowan thought it was the white sail of a boat until we realised what it was. The prediction was for 4-5m swells in the sea. We are definitely staying put.
We went and snorkelled outside the atoll and did a long drift dive along the drop off, the sea was pretty churned up so not great visibility. We spotted a couple of big sharks, I’ve got rather blase about them as we have seen so many. But within a few seconds there must have been seven big sharks circling around us, suddenly Rowan shouted at me to get on the boat, I scrambled up the ladder at haste while Rowan leapt on. Rowan thought they were suddenly looking more in feeding mode! If Rowan was finding it worrying, I knew it must be serious! Maybe we need those knives strapped to our legs after all.
Rowan had a little swim in the afternoon from the boat, but he said the current was pretty testy. Otherwise it was a quiet day catching up on a few things. A big French Catamaran arrived with loads of people on board and then a monohull with a young French couple on board. The vast majority of boats are French, understandably I suppose with it being a French territory.
We invited Fred and Judy from PitPony around for drinks. Rowan picked them up as they had lifted their dinghy onto their boat after having a terrible time with it during the storm, he reckoned it nearly blew away. They are leaving tomorrow for Papeete so no point in getting their dinghy back in the water. They told us they had seen the French boat leave at 6am and it was bouncing about crazily getting out of here, luckily they are very accomplished sailors by the sound of it. We discovered a lot about Fred and Judy, he used to work in the mines hence the name of the boat. They are from Wollongong, NSW which had both steel and coal mines, now it is just steel mines. She said it used to be a very industrial city but with the collapse of the coal mines and property prices sky rocketing in Sydney, it has become an affordable suburb of Sydney, 50 minutes by train to Sydney. They had loads of stories, including a year of lock down during Covid in the Sea of Cortez off Mexico. They have been at sea for 6 years and are very ready to head home, just stopping in Fiji for theirs son’s wedding! They sold up everything when they left and just kept their ski Cabin in the ski region about 5 hours from Woolongong, that is where they return to.
Looking out over the atoll, there is not much land on the other side, a lot of the edge is just coral reef under the water
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