N 07° 06.369
E 171° 22.344

… waiting for Tobi to come in the little harbor where I docked the tender when we made inbound clearance.

Today, first I made my last 2 h dive to clean the rest of the PRT hull. Both hulls a very clean and I hope MaRe makes 6.1 KN under engines with cruising RPM and no wind or wind abeam. That would be nice and result in a fast sail to Kosrae.

Thereafter, we took the tender to the ESE dinghy dock and went first to the Port Authorities to pay USD 10.- port fees; the first station for the outbound clearance procedure. But then the immigration odyssey started.

We went to into an office with “immigration” written above the entrance door. There, we where told that we need to go to different office a bit further down the road. When we arrived there we where told we need to go to the office a bit further up the road. We tried to find this office and asked a police officer sitting in a car along our way. They brought us back to the place where we were before. This time we learned that we have to wait for an hour until an officers comes, which is a different story than the one we were told before.

As we were hungry we wanted to use this 1 h for a quick lunch and went to Annie’s Bakery which we saw before opposite the other immigrating office, which is not on charge of our outbound immigration matter.

After lunch, we went to customs just 100-200 m away. Tobi read in No-Foreign-Land that the office is in the first floor. We went there just to be told that it’s in in the ground floor. There was the customs office! Within 5-10 min we had our second outbound clearance document; this time from customs.

Immigration officers where are you???

We went back to the immigration office where we were very first. The information we got was, “An officer is coming”. “When?” I asked and got the reply, “In a minute”. “Wonderful!” I said and thought “I’m even willing to wait 10 min of needed. “

Within a minute an officer came to bring us, by car, to the office at the dock for smaller inter island freighter around the corner where MaRe turns around her mooring ball.

As we had the tender close to K&K supermarket the officer offered us that one come with him and the other goes shopping and takes the tender back and picks up the other in the little harbor at the immigration office.

We took this offer. Tobi got off at K&K, to get the food we need and he knows, whereas I went with the officer. The officer was a very nice guy and we talked about sailing etc.

Within 10 min after arriving at his office I had the outbound clearance stamps on our passports.

Ready for official departure.!!!

I’m still sitting in the dock of the bay… waiting for Tobi to pick me up.

Looking at my watch I guess it will be 1700 as we considered as realistic departure time. We get off of the mooring ball to sail at daylight through the pass out of the Majuro atoll, to turn SW to Kosrae at the northern end of the atoll where we spent 16 days nice days including Christmas and New Year.