Anchored at Ovalau

We had this island all to ourselves

Such a beautiful spot

Later on Ladybug and Black Dog showed up and we had sundowners on Charisma

We’re still anchored at Ovalau Island. But today, only one other boat was here and they didn’t go ashore, so we had the island to ourselves. We went ashore at low tide and walked halfway around until we couldn’t go any further without swimming! The sand was very fine and felt good between our toes after so much coral sand that is much coarser. One of the benefits of your own private island is there are no footprints in the sand. But wait! There were! Closer examination revealed they belonged to a goat family-looked like a large male, a female and a couple of baby goats including a very tiny one. I had visions of myself stealthily moving through the jungle with a bandana tied around my head to absorb the sweat, gripping a large knife in my teeth while parting the foliage with my sharpened stake. Ann just wanted to see the cute little goats.

So there we were; Rambo and Heidi. We decided to compromise and just hunt for sea shells.

After our island excursion it was back to Charisma for lunch and a nap (actually Ann did some sewing on the mainsail where a couple of seams had rubbed the thread off) in anticipation of our leaving tonight around 2300 for Ha’apai. More specifically we’re going to the island of Ha’apana in the Ha’api group. It’s about 63 miles from where we’re anchored and we’d like to get there early in the day for a change. We’ve been making too many landfalls at the last possible minute of sunlight. Not safe in an area like this.

OK, now that I think of it, I actually did something useful today besides nap. I made four new lures for fishing. They are very nice looking, but there’s one flaw-the biggest line we have is 100lb test and for the handline we really should be using 300# test. You can’t find it here so we have, what we have. I put a new bungee cord on the line so hopefully that will absorb the shock and we will catch something instead of losing the lure. They say the fish (like a 100 lb Tuna) hit at something like 60 miles/hour so you can see that the lures need to be tough! Well, like I said-they look really good.

Pray to the Tuna god, we need some sushi.