[password] pilot25041
[position] 13 14.85s 163 06.5w
[status] Saturday 25th August ........ and we're still here in the beautiful Suwarrow atoll, apparently we are the 85th boat to visit this season, the 'rangers' John & Harry visited us just after 5pm on Wednesday to go through and complete far too much paperwork ....... a bit over officious really, but safely negotiated. The 'rules' for this National Park are fairly strict ........ no fishing or catching land crabs, no dumping of anything or cleaning of the boat in the lagoon, no taking any booze or food ashore etc etc.

So what have we been up to since the last blog ......... in a nutshell ....... not a lot! We had a couple of drinks and an early night on Wednesday, then Thursday morning the cat and one of the monohulls departed on their voyages, we did washing and a few jobs on the boat, then in the afternoon went ashore and walked halfway around Anchorage island. At the far side we met up with 'Aussie' Nick from Sea Urchin ...... he left Greece about 2yrs ago, has different crew that turn up and depart along the way, but currently solo. Then there were Lucas & Ella from Switzerland on yacht Bajka, they left Europe 18mths ago and are taking a 2yr sabbatical with their two boys (4&5yrs old), they plan to get to NZ, sell their yacht and go home ready for the boys to start school.
Back to Surreal we saw a yacht approaching outside the lagoon .......... some time later 'Complicite' was anchored not far from us in the lagoon, this yacht which left Montreal in October 2017 had just come up from Rarotonga via Palmerston and had a new radio for the rangers. Its owner is a late middle aged guy called Peter, who retired early, sold his house and bought the boat last September ...... having absolutely no sailing experience, he then employed a professional skipper to get him to the Bahamas and he picks up crew along the way ........ currently 3 very young ladies, 2 who joined him in Panama and the other a younger sister of one of the 2 who has just completed high school in Canada and joined in Rarotonga.

Yesterday we went out to a reef in the lagoon to snorkel and try to see the huge manta rays, unfortunately the sea was too rough and windy, then we saw P'zazz arriving so went across to see them as they were starting to anchor and let them know they could park nearer to shore ........ they'd just caught a 4ft long Spanish Mackerel just outside the pass entrance! More jobs then done on the boat including removing the stbd black tank overboard pump, as the stbd tank has been filling by itself in about 10-12hrs! The joker valves were jammed up with what looked like pebbles, but is more probably calcification from the tank, and hence the reason the stbd tank takes 3-4 times as long as the port one to empty. We're hopeful this will now work better and the indications so far look good as the tank is still indicating 'low' after nearly 24hrs!

Paul from Pzazz kindly gave us some of their fresh fish yesterday afternoon, some Marlin they caught 2days ago and the Spanish Mackerel ......... He then returned later with Graham & Martin (his current crew) for sundowners, Martin is originally from Brazil but has lived in NZ for many years and he had carefully prepared 2 plates of raw fish for our sundowner accompaniment ..... with some soya sauce, wasabi and sushi sauce, this was absolutely delicious. When they left we then had the Marlin cooked on the bbq which was again absolutely fantastic!

So today, we're again going to try and see the manta rays, hopefully with the wind forecast to be a lot lighter we can do some more minor repairs to the mainsail chafe areas, we will probably be leaving here over the next 48hrs en route to Pago Pago in Western Samoa.

[END]