Part of the path across the island

What is this strange thing hanging in the jungle?

...oh, I see. If you can read this it's too late.

That’s what it said on the chart; “Secluded Beach”. With a name like that, we had to take the hike. So, in the dinghy, motor to shore. Once there we found a fairly new hut, but it had a lock on it and no one around. The chart said no one lived here, so we’re thinking this is a copra shed. We hiked all around looking for a trail but couldn’t find it. So, we headed down the beach. Went to the end of the beach-about 200 yards, but nothing. So, back to the dinghy. We decided to try the “other” side of the beach-about 50 yards of beach. Bingo! A trail! It took about 20 minutes to hike to the other side of the island and the famous “Secluded Beach”. We got there and guess what? There were some people and a dog. OK, so it’s now “Almost Secluded Beach”. Once we got to the people we introduced ourselves and…they were from Beausoleil-the only boat in the fleet from Mexico that we haven’t met up with yet. We had some fun trading stories but they won-they have been cruising for 15 years and are headed to New Zealand as their last stop.

Anyway, we had a fun day hiking (I got a coconut so we’re having coconut dipped in Nutella for dessert and we found a papaya tree and knocked off a nice ripe papaya for breakfast). Now we’re finished dinner (eggplant chutney on top of fresh/frozen Mahi that John and Lisa on Orcinius caught a week or so ago and gave to us.

We plan to stay in this anchorage for another day or so and snorkel some more of the reefs around here and then move to a new spot TBD.

Oh, yeah, one other thing. Ann was doing an inventory on our stores the other day and realized that we have a lot of some stuff and not enough of other stuff (that’s the technical description of the situation), so she’s been doing some trading with other cruisers. So far, we’ve traded some walnuts that we have extra of for toilet paper (it’s really expensive down here) and we gave John and Lisa some ground coffee we have from Mexico (appropriately sealed) and Gatorade for shaving cream and who knows what. Should be fun-we’ll see tomorrow when we get together to finalize our trade with them.

New Zealand is very strict about what they allow in the country so we’re all drawing down things like nuts, canned meat, fruit and other stuff that they just won’t let into the country. Trading is one way to equalize what we have for what we need in these last weeks before sailing there. Good thing Ann has such an accurate inventory!