“That was great! Could be the flavors, but maybe it’s the banjo music”.

Ah, Spam or Taj Mahal. That’s the existential, question for today.

Our anchorage.

Some pretty sweet snorkeling here.

Ann's turning into a fish!

So, we finally got a nice sunny day where we could see the reefs (bommies) under the water and avoid them on our 1.8 mile move over to the other anchorage. We’ve now got a 7:1 scope out in 18 feet of sand. Nice. And the bonus is that this part of the lagoon is completely different from where we’ve been for the last 10 days. We moved 1.8 miles and are in essence in a completely different place. Nice.

Once we got anchored and had some lunch we went out with some of the other folks “over here” to snorkel the pass. Gypsea Heart, Blue Rodeo, Evergreen and Slip Away are over here and it was nice to hook up with them again. Anyway, to “snorkel the pass”, you get your gear in the dinghy and motor about ½ mile around some rocks and outside the reef where you jump in the water just after low slack when the tides coming in. In theory the new tide washes you into the lagoon with clear fresh water. That’s pretty much what happened. We got just outside where the waves were breaking, slid over the side of the dinghy (with it tied to my waist) and then I swam to keep the wind from blowing it to the other side of the pass onto the reef while the tide pushed us in. At a couple points we were moving pretty fast. It was exhilarating. We saw a lot of fish and coral and clear water. Just what we expected. Tomorrow I’m hoping to go further out and jump in where the pelagic fish are. Reports are that the large fish further outside are stunning to see, but we wanted to take it easy the first day here and not get too crazy. One of our friend’s dinghy flipped over onto the reef two days ago-everyone’s OK, but it could have been bad. We want to avoid that kind of problem and be conservative.

So….tomorrow, we’re thinking that we’ll tow the two the paddleboards with the dinghy about 150 meters toward the island into the calmer water and tool around. It’s blowing about 18 knots in the area where we’re anchored which is a bit much for paddleboarding, but in toward the beach looks really nice. We’ll see and report back. There’s also talk about taking the dinghies into the shallow water near the beach for a sunset raft up cocktail party. That would be nice 😉