Position: 18 degrees, 02 minutes south; 163 degrees, 11 minutes west

On our mooring at Palmerston

They have six moorings and a reef entrance that cannot be believed. The current is too high to get in with a dinghy so they pick you up. There are only eight moorings here.

A brilliant two and a half day sail culminated with sailing around the reef on the way to the anchorage and having three whales jumping for joy. There are five other boats here and they said they heard the whales singing last night through their hulls. Let’s hope for more of the same tonight.

At first when we got here I was let down a bit. It’s a poor place to anchor and their are only five moorings, so not a good way to start out to find out you have to anchor in the coral. There’s no sand whatsoever, so we’re trusting on benign weather to keep us in place and off the reef tonight. Looks like one of the boats is leaving tomorrow, and we have permission to take their mooring when they leave. This will leave us with a more trustworthy way to secure the boat. As if to punctuate the issue, when we got ashore the first thing we saw under the coconut trees is the hulk of a Valiant 42 shipwrecked here last year when they broke free of their mooring and was driven across the reef in 12 foot waves. What a way to start the day.

Backing up a tiny bit, we made landfall at 0200 last night. Since we didn’t want to come into an unfamiliar area at night, we hove to until dawn about 3 miles off the south end of the atoll. I had the night watch for that period, so I got to just sit and watch some of the most beautiful stars we’re seen on the trip. Then we saw the whales jumping which added a sense of joy to the early morning.

We didn’t know what to expect out of a place like this. As I’ve mentioned, there are only 60 people living on the atoll and half of those are children. They have purposefully shunned many “opportunities” such as an airport and pearl farms in order to keep their atoll pristine-which it is. We’re in the clearest 40 feet of water I’ve ever seen. It’s clear like a cold mountain stream, but it’s warm and incredibly blue (all the shades from ice blue to deep indigo).

But despite all the beauty-and there is a phenomenal amount of it-it’s the wonderful people here that I think we were all unprepared for. By the time we finished dinner with “our sponsor” (each boat here has a family who sponsors them and takes care of them while on the atoll) any care of how the anchor was or wasn’t working left. I literally don’t care. We’ll deal with it, but I want to spend more time with these amazingly nice, sincere and open people. Just walking around today, we were invited to sit down and eat lunch with one of the families. They treated us like long lost friends and we spent two hours under their rusted tin-roofed and rickety tree branch-made outdoor dinning table.

But…we’re exhausted not having slept since I don’t know when, so you’ll have to wait until tomorrow night for the description of the evening.

Thanks and good night!