N 05° 19.776
E 163° 01.294

Yesterday at around 1700 we dropped the hook in the eastern bay of Kosrae.

The last 50 NM we had a nice sailing wind with windspeeds above 15 KN. The swell rose to almost 4 m and we approached the entry pass into eastern bay with speed.

Tobi was all day long waiting to get a fish, ideally a mahi-mahi on the hook. However, there was nothing. Shortly after the last gybe, just while on the last short leg to the entry pass, he got a mahi-mahi on the hook.

I started keeping fingers crossed that the fish is hauled in quickly. A good fishing team we became, we just followed our standard procedure. Tobi fought with the fish. I furled the genoa to get STW down to about 2 KN, then grabbed my harness and the gaff, when Tobi had the fish, a nice mahi-mahi at the stern, I was ready for gaffing.

The fish was quickly on deck. Tobi prepared the HDPE board at the entrance, the place at MaRe for evicerating and filleting the catch.

While Tobi worked on the fish, I prepared MaRe for going through the pass. Then it was time to turn onto the leading line in the sea chart. When I was already through the pass and on the inner course to the considered anchor spot (we got their anchorage coordinates from Manon & Stef of SV Long John Silver) Tobi finished his work and was ready in time to drop the anchor.

There were 3 Danish boats in the bay. A cat and two monos. Unfortunately the cat was more or less where I wanted to go and further north I tested the depth and it appeared as too shallow. Fortunately there was enough space between the cat and the next mono. There I went and Tobi dropped the hook. The first time it didn’t hold, but the second time it worked out fine. We were safe at anchor.

Now, I needed to solve the issue that we could not charge the batteries anymore. Various tests we made during the day, indicated that the both battery isolators are broken. A quick solution would have been to get a hand carry generator and charge the batteries through the shore power connection.

Then a tender returned to the neighbor boat, the mono on our STB side and I called the lady to please come over. (Our tender was still in long distance sailing mode with the motor mounted on it holder in the cockpit.).

Sarah, got a knowledgable guy, Methi, with a 2.5 kW generator to MaRe. However the generator seems to have problem. It doesn’t charge with 600 W of its 2.5 kW. However we could use it to slowly charge the service batteries and connect to Starlink to exchange mails and messages.

Dinner was what Tobi and I talked about days, pan fried mahi-mahi and potato salad. Excellent!

Today, after inbound clearance, I checked the ACE store and the AB Electronics for isolators. They don’t have such items.

However, the ACE hardware store as well as the foodstore have an excellent offer on products, I didn’t see since leaving NZ.

We hitchhiked to the other side of islands. This was very easy as the people are very friendly here. Sometimes we just say on the cargo bay of a little truck.

We observed a very special element of the traffic here. It’s a right side driving traffic. However, cars have the steering wheel on right side. Which country introduced right side traffic we don’t know, but as the used cars are coming from Japan, they have the steering wheel on the right side. With the slow speed of the traffic and the many holes in the street this is no problem at all.

The little museum showed many photographies of foreigners coming to the island for their counties interests in the Micronesian Islands. It seems many of these traders mainly whalers, where more “pirates” then traders, which created troubles. But also the kings and higher ups took the advantages of trading into their own pockets.

Venereal diseases brought into the Kosrae reduced the population from 1700 to 747 before it fortunately recovered again.

We returned to MaRe with a lot of impressions on the new islands we reached.

Solar charging was very good during the day so we had enough power for the night. However the wind picked up quite a bit and then three charging of mates
MaRe’s SuperWind 350 turbine kicked in and we got additional power.

The same time it started raining so we could collect rainwater and have a good shower, with more than the normal 1 l of water. Felt pretty good.

For dinner Tobi made usuku-kiri (thinly sliced) mahi-mahi with ginger and soy sauce and udon (thick Japanese noodles). Excellent again.