Our voyage to Samoa, had an unfortunate start. Due to weather and wind conditions, we wouldn't be making it back to Aitutaki. Instead, we headed to one of the most isolated land spots on the planet. Nestled in the pacific ocean is a group of tiny islands protected by reef. Suwarrow has a population of two caretakers for six months. For the rest of the time, its zero. Its also rumoured that pirates buried their treasure on one of the islands...There are no crowds, no airport, no charter boats, nothing to disturb the natural life here. Our ship was only able to manoeuvre through the reef at a certain tide but it was definitely worth it. We anchored off the appropriately named 'anchor island' and spent our nights sitting together drinking under the moonlight. In fact one night we even saw a full moon bow.
Between the cooking, I got ashore and was shocked at how many hermit crabs were about. The abundance of life in the water was also amazing; with coral, shoals of fish, most of the cast of finding Nemo, massive shoals of parrot fish and sharks - lots of sharks. If Aititaki was snorkel heaven, this was the v.i.p room. During one snorkel, we reach 'the shelf' (a huge drop from shallows to deeper water) and had an amazing sight of hundreds to fish, big and small, moving around clusters of coral. When a group of reef sharks came along my heart began to fasten.
"it’s ok" I told myself "there just little guys who can't do any damage." And then my snorkel buddy told me we had to move out of the water. Another shark had also turned up, but this guy was brown, as long as a man and we did not want to be around with him! we crawled through the shallows as fast as we could, the longest crawl of my life.
For the rest of the time we manoeuvred through the coral beach (ouch!), found a shady spot to laze in and snooped around the caretakers accommodation. Here we found a whale bone, flags from visiting vessels and a book exchange (in which I swapped middle march for the hobbit)
On the day we were meant to leave, it seems The Soren wasn't ready to go. As we tried to raise the anchor, the windlass decided to play up, and then once the problem was fixed, we'd lost our window to get out of the lagoon. So another night in Suwarrow it was. And on the spare of the moment, we had a BBQ on the beach. With a fire and sausages in our belly, we went on the hunt for coconut crabs (which are huge and sometimes blue). And then we entertained ourselves putting crabs on Jim's face.
The Next day it was time to leave paradise, off to find Samoa.
1 comment:
Absolutely unreal!
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