Thursday 4 September – kid’s ceremony

Our plan was to head to Kavieng tomorrow, this is the biggest town around here and where we will check out of PNG. We have Rowan’s best man and wife from San Francisco joining us here for 10 days next week. We are hoping for some good provisioning too as our stocks run low. Rowan checked the weather over our morning cuppas, the wind has changed and it is much better to leave today to avoid some big thunderstorms. That got us up and going, as we have the kid’s ceremony to attend thatChief Linus invited us to yesterday.

We went for a long drift snorkel along the reef near us, the coral was much better than a lot that we have seen. Quite a lot of fish and some bigger ones. I forgot to mention on the way over to this anchorage Rowan caught a marlin, wow it put up a huge fight jumping out the water and smashing down, so much so that it broke the line, just hope it gets rid of the hook ok. It gave such an impressive fight. Earlier this morning we had seen a marlin jumping about, we wonder what it was escaping from. On our snorkel we disturbed a turtle that must have been in a cleaning station under a rock, it flew out with a couple of huge remora fish attached.

At 11:30 we were back at the village as requested. We were meant to be meeting his son in law who could be the WhatsApp contact for the yachts, he actually works on the mines at the next island but was given compassionate leave for the funeral of a relative. However there were delays getting the body to the right place or something, so we missed him as we could not wait all afternoon. The kids put on their performance, the boys did very well a lot better than the girls whose routine rather fell apart, clearly not practiced. Sadly the youth are not that keen on the cultural stuff, I guess phones give them access to the outside world. It was a fun event nevertheless, with Chief Linus giving long Pigin speeches that we could get the gist of. One comment was very funny, he said we were from Africa which is why we know how to talk to black people…..it was a compliment! After Rowan said a few words, we gave a donation to the school, handed out lollipops to the kids and said our goodbyes. I must say it has been a stunning anchorage, with such friendly jolly people.

Back on board PolePole we were soon picking up the anchor and left by 2pm. A gentle wind from behind us, so we had the new parasail up, and had a gentle sail past various islands. Spotting the big mining area at dusk which was all lit up, we could see the lights at night from the anchorage, over 40 miles away. This mine is still an active volcano, can you imagine how hot and dangerous that is!

Squalls arrived and we had to get the sail down and get the engines on. We had a couple of massive squalls to get through, luckily there was very little lightning. I did the first shift to midnight, which went in a flash as I communicated with the guy setting up the new blog. Sadly it is going to be a few more days before it goes live.