Someone had the idea to go around the island with the tender. As the island is really not big it’s possible to do it. Thus after a lunch we took off.

Before we reached the NW corner, we passed a pier, leading to a long wooded stair going up the hill. With colorful blossoms at one side and lush green on the other it looked nicely inviting to go up There as bit towards NW on top of the hill 2 – 3 houses.

After reaching the top of the stairs, we saw that one small dirt road leads to the houses, and another, a concrete road, led down the hill into a construction side. We learned already in Savusavu that there is work going on to built a resort. For people interested in diving, this can become a great place. As we also wanted to go to the E side of Namena Island, we walked down into the construction side.

On the way down, we saw a booby bird chicken lying on a strange spot in a strange position.

Joe, with her warm heart wanted to give it food, and I considered that it will die because it fell out of the nest about 7 my above. We left it alone and moved on.

The construction site looked as being in full swing, but no worker was to be seen at all. The cottages, although non was was completed, made a good impression. Large areas of the walls were only built of windows where jalousie type. A wonderful window design for a warm climate like in the Fifis.

We walked to the beach. First Joe then also Norah and Peter jumped into the water but I didn’t want to get wet.

They swam, I walked until a big trees with about 20 nests with young red feeted boobies in it caught my attention. A young Bobby caught my special attention because it was to be seen that it tried for the first time to use his wings to fly and I watched it. Carefully and a bit helpless, but successfully it could fly 4 branches higher, one by one, but when it attempted a longer flight of about 3 – 5 m, it just fell down and crashed with open wings into a branch much lower than it’s starting point. An a bit unsuccessful attempt to use its wings. Learning by doing.

A bent palm tree invited me to half sit and half lay down it. I could watch the bird on one side and looking straight, I overlooked the blue ocean rolling gently on the sandy beach. My OBM commented on the picture of that scene, which I uploaded on the OmaOpa account in Signal, “Little paradise”, which describes it well. These moments on the palm tree stay burnt in my memory.

Later we continued our little tour around the island with the tender. People living on one of the houses up the hill waved us and we waved backed.

Then the wind and waves increased pretty fast and we had not yet reached the NE corner where a bigger reef is. With the increasing waves and wind it could become dangerous to cross the reef and once we are around the SW corner we have to consider that the waves can be pretty high. Thus, we turned around and had smooth ride back. Wind and waves came from astern.

Once we where close to MaRe we decided to go to the SW end of the island. The wind from NE died, but when we reached the SW corner, the wind picked up from SW. As we could have a look around the corner already we turned back to MaRe with stop over at an Australian boat and having a friendly chat with the couple on board.