We left as planned this morning at 0730. It was not a perfect day – a bit more overcast than I like for going out the reef, but it looked promising later. It was either today or wait until next week as it looks like there’s a bit of a weather system that’s going to hold people down for a few days. Cowboy Joe and his boys were spear fishing at the pass and so one more hearty goodbye and lots of waving was had. We will miss Fulunga.

So…off we went with Orcinius behind us. We made the 20 mile passage to Numuka-i-Lau in three hours. We had 15 knots of wind on the beam and we carried a double reef main and yankee jib. The stays’l would have been nice, but the dinghy was on the foredeck for the short passage and in the way of the boom. Even so, we averaged 5 knots over the distance from anchor up to anchor down. Fortunately the sun came out as we approached because there are some bommies to be avoided on the entrance and you can’t see them in cloudy weather. We threaded our way in to a lovely little cove with two beaches.

Once here and anchored in a patch of sand next to Orcinius, both boats had “anchoring beers”, a little lunch and a short nap. Then around 1400 John and Lisa picked us up in their (larger than ours) dinghy and we went around the island to the village (also named Namuka-i-Lau) which is about three miles away, to do sevusevu with the village chief.

We had to go almost all the way to the other end of the island and it was low tide so when we got there we had to anchor the dinghy about 200 meters off the beach and squish squash in through the mud and eel grass. Yuck, not fun! Turned out that there is a rocky path another couple hundred meters up the beach that we didn’t see. Oh well. But one of the villagers got one of the boys to wade out and drag the dinghy up to the better spot. Nice. John gave him a dollar and a pocketknife that I had brought in for just this sort of favor.

A long walk through the muck at low tide.

We did sevusevu with Chief Jone and his right hand man, Kingsley. It was a pretty simple one. We took a few pictures and headed out for a tour of the village. This is a surprisingly large village. We think it has somewhere around 350 people including children. That’s quite large compared to any other village we’ve been to.

Chief Jone (on left).

Namuka has a different feel than Fulanga. For one, they have horses here!

Wish we could have spent more time here. The people were very nice.

Namuka-i-Lau and several other islands north of here specialize in the making of tapas which are paper made from wood bark, then painted with many intricate ornamentals designs usually in brown and black paint made from earthen dyes. The wood bark has to be stripped from the trees, soaked then pounded into paper squares which are in turn pounded some more to make larger sizes. We saw them some tapas to be used in a wedding in Suva that were eight feet long. The main one for the wedding was 15 feet square. Very impressive and needless to say incredibly labor intensive. I asked if they would make one for us and they asked, “How big?” After some back and forth we settled on 6 foot by 4 foot. I think. You’re never quite sure, but they said with happy smiles on their faces; “Come in on Saturday and pick it up”. So, we’ll find out on Saturday.

Huge wedding tapa. The cloth is made by pounding six inch wide strips together.

Stay tuned. We’ll be here probably through Monday to wait out the weather, then maybe one more island north in the Lau, then across to Nairai where the bottle we threw over at the equator was found last year (the story of meeting these folks and seeing our bottle is in the July archive for 2013 on this blog).