Tuesday 27 January – off to Hoga Island

We got going before breakfast in nice calm weather. We easily dropped our lines, with no wind it was a motor across to Hoga Island about 30 miles away. A German boat had been anchored here up until a few days ago, they have moved on to an atoll, we have the place to ourselves. We arrived just after lunch and secured ourselves successfully in the stunningly clear water of the anchorage. The area is full of reefs, so we had to wiggle our way through, surprisingly there are some markers, but best not to rely on them. Our secondary screen at the navigation desk has stopped working, it sadly has the SD card reader with our card for the up to date navigation charts. So we are using very basic level charts until our new screen arrives with my nephew Lovat from Hong Kong in the middle of Feb. So Rowan is having to use his phone as an additional navigation tool, it is making his phone work so hard that to save power the screen keeps going dark, which is all a bit hair raising coming through these reefs. Thankfully we got in no problem and feel very secure here even though we are surrounded by reefs.

Dan on a long boat came to visit us and offered to do a few tours for us, one was to visit the Bajo village here where he lives and the other tour was to go snorkelling. We will do both after tomorrow as Rowan has made plans for my birthday! Rowan went for a great snorkel around 4pm, he said the coral and fish life was great, the water was a bit too full of rubbish for me. We watched endless locals fishing in their longboats, a group of 4 boats near us each had a long pole that they would smack the water with, they were obviously trying to herd the fish into nets. At one point they all jumped into the water, they were to far away to see what they hauled out.

Rowan cooked up a storm for supper with all his ingredients from the market, plus he bought a Sweetlips fish off Dan, such a beautiful fish with the plumpest big juicy yellow lips. He made a delicious vegetable dish with the local spinach and pawpaw flowers, which he had to boil in tamarind to get the bitterness out of the flowers. Accompanied with the usual aubergines on the BBQ but this time with a delicious tomato chilly sauce. It was a great feast, only marred by the stormy rainy weather which brought out thousands of small flying ants, that forced us to turn out all the lights. It was carnage, we finally opted to go to bed, luckily we had closed the door and all the windows have mosquito nets on so it was a sanctuary. With our new aircon we were happily in bed early!