Position: 09 degrees, 42 minutes South; 139 degrees, 00 minutes West

Here's Blue Rodeo at anchor in the late (squally) afternoon.

Today we started the day with a fine breakfast of bananas (from the stalk hanging from the binnacle), papplemoose (look it up—yummy!) and coffee. We sat in the cockpit enjoying the cool morning air watching the sunlight fill the canyon that we walked in yesterday.

Many times today we have pinched ourselves to remind us how lucky we are. WE ARE SAILING IN THE MARQUESAS! Yesterday’s visit with the Polynesians in Baia Hanamenu finally made it seem real.

We left the beautiful anchorage and let Charisma (and Bob) play on the ocean again. It was beautiful sailing along a stunning coast. The coast was decorated with shades of green (one of my favorite colors), sea caves and waterfalls. All topped by squalls that rolled over the top but stayed on shore.

We are now in another lovely little bay with just ourselves and our friends Blue Rodeo (Mark and Ann). Our own cove, again.

Blue Rodeo invited us to drinks, where we again all pinched ourselves. It seems to have hit them too. It’s setting in. Not wanting to go over empty handed we created our new Marquesan hors d’ouevres – sliced bananas topped with Nutella. We added chopped peanuts to half of them and sliced Maraschino cherries on the other half. We really were just being silly but they were a huge hit!

Oh, we had a minor burial at sea today. No, I didn’t kill the captain. After all of the cleaning I had done to the food lockers we opened one and smelled something. How could that be possible? I emptied every one and used bleach in each locker, wiped down each can, bag etc. Well, we found the offender – the eggs! I had some paper egg cartons that Cliff and Leslynn saved for us, as well as three of the REI plastic egg crates. I had planned only to use the plastic ones only to transport eggs to the boat, but in a provisioning seminar we were told that the plastic crates had worked fine and would be easier to clean up if there was any breakage. Luckily I only half listened. The 2 ½ dozen eggs in the plastic cartons had turned and were spoiling – with quite a pungent odor when I opened the crates. The dozen and a half that are in the paper cartons are fine. Over board the offending eggs went! NOW I feel confident that we have taken care of any hidden spoilage.

Now we need to eat all of the great fruit we were gifted before it spoils! By the way, Bob made up corks with four good fishing hooks inserted that we can give as gifts to the generous villagers we meet.

P.S. from Bob. I forgot to tell the other part of our Heart of Darkness tour yesterday: The pig traps. Kind of scary. We were walking through the jungle looking at the ruins and just off the path was a split coconut hanging from a string. I walked over to see what this was and almost feel into the pig trap. There was a 8×8 foot wide by 4 foot deep hole, covered by palm fronds under the split coconut. Yipes! No sharpened stakes inside or anything and one corner of the trap was “caved in” (which is how we know it was four feet deep) suggesting it had done its duty. But still kind of eerie.