Commodore
July 28, 2025

Tuesday 29 July – stunning scenery

The day started with a lovely sighting of the Solomon’s endemic Sanford’s eagle, poor things are pretty endangered according to google, only 1000 left. It was huge , Ive looked it up and their wingspan is 165 to 185cm, as tall as Rowan! We also saw a white cockatoo yesterday when we were sitting on Elijah’s deck. We had a local come out in a canoe to sell us jewellery, quite enterprising compared to most of the guys trading. Very sadly he had amazing shells and tortoise shell jewellery. We did not want to support that so it was a tricky purchase, but I got a few things, these people are struggling for a living.

We decided to move to this narrow small anchorage between two islands that was quite hard to navigate. A little narrow neck before getting into the open area to anchor, crawling over dark coral heads we could see in the crystal clear water. Always a relief to make it over without a ghastly scraping noise. We got the anchor down with just enough swinging room to keep us off the banks we hoped. On one side was the island Prince William and Kate came to in 2012 and on the other side was a beautiful collection of traditional houses. It really was an idyllic setting. We went to pay our respects to the chief, who had to be called, we obviously interrupted his lunch with the amount of food spraying out when he talked. He gave us permission to walk around and snorkel, I just wan’t allowed to the black rocks, it was Tabu, men only. Usually for some spiritual reason.

Rowan has found an amazing anchorage in all his research, however there are warnings saying you must visit the chief first. We couldn’t find the spot to go to his home, so we stopped off at the island next door where we spotted some people. There was a family gathering, with lots of squealing, it was a poor pig all tied up, being put in a canoe. We thought it must be going to be slaughtered, but discovered it was being taken to the main island to be mated! Luckily a young girl there said she would take us to Joaquin the chief’s house. It was a trick to find the way through the very shallow coral. Joaquin wasn’t home, but his rather dodgy son was there and promised to hand over the gifts. We went for a little explore in the dinghy and decided to go to the island where we wanted to anchor tomorrow. It was a stunning little island, reminding us of the San Blas Islands in Panama. Happily it looked much easier to get to than where we are currently

We got back to PolePole as the tide was coming in, it was swirling us all around, and we were only about 3ms off the bank. We finally felt too uncomfortable so decided to pick up the anchor and move. Typically it was nearly 5pm and the weather was closing in. It’s always easier getting out of somewhere as we can follow our route marker that we took in. Plus is was nearly high tide, so a lot less scary. It only took about 20 minutes to get to our next spot. We dropped anchor on the edge of the island, the drop off is really steep. We were all settled just in time before the weather arrived.

Just as it was getting dark, an old boy in a very leaky canoe turns up, turns out it was Joaquin. He came on board and chatted for ages, not bothered about it getting dark. We heard his canoe bump Polepole, he went over to sort it out and discovered the canoe was nearly submerged it had such a big hole in it. He was trying to tear bits of his own shirt off to try and stuff the hole. We finally found some rags for him, which stemmed the flow enough to bale the canoe out. We gave him a bag of goodies, a good reason for him to start his journey home before it was pitch dark.