With the first daylight wer lifted the hook and went towards the pass through the outer reef. It turned out, as expected the WPT from Don, was perfect. So we went through the pass without any concerns.<\/p>\n
Thereafter it was pretty easy. With a bit of wind on the nose we had no choice but use the engines. Thus, cruising RPM of 1800, and the autopilot on track mode and the 25 NM to Makongai Island was only a question of time.<\/p>\n
However, I was very busy with attempts to get the Raymarine Control app on my tablet running. Also pretty buggy, it normally runs quickly; today it did not run at all and I have no clue what the root cause could be. Will ask my “Raymarine guy”.<\/p>\n
Then I turned MaRe about 100 deg to PRT and she was on the line to go through the pass of the outer reef. On our STB side there was the big Vavu Value reef with big breaking waves. Impressive, but I’m glad to keep this reef on our STB side in sufficient distance.<\/p>\n
After we were just beyond the middle of the pass, I saw dead ahead a pretty white wave. Although, it was about 2 NM away I was shocked that I didn’t have this reef on my mind. In the next moment I understood why; it was a whale jumping out of the water and splashing back in. Then we saw a few more jumps. What a pity that we could not be closer. After we turned again to PRT on our way to the anchorage behind an island, it was Joe who told me that there is a whale just 100 my on front of us. The fluke was nicely to be seen. We all looked very concentrated into this direction when there was suddenly a loud noise just at the PRT side of MaRe. A humpback whale jumped 5 m away from MaRe’s PRT hull. What a scene!<\/p>\n
After this massive welcome spectacle, we finally saw two whales blowing just behind MaRe then their flukes went under water again.<\/p>\n
I’m curious when AI will decipher the whales’ language and what they talk about.<\/p>\n
When we turned into the bay where we wanted to anchor, we were the only boat there. I tested the water depth closer to the shore to decide where to drop the hook. This was finally at 17 m. First the anchor slipped a bit,**** but then with 70 m of chain or got a firm grip.<\/p>\n
We were at our destination!<\/p>\n
When I tested the depth closer to the shore, we also saw to floats on top of a round reef. I assumed it is the “chimney bommie” described in the Soggy Paws’ compendium.<\/p>\n
A while later we got the confirmation. We took the tender, drove over to this reef and snorkeled and free dived around the spectacular reef. Round and tall like chimney it comes up from about 15 m deep ground. We had an interesting time there.<\/p>\n
After changing clothes, Norah, Peter, and I took the tender to the pier of the small settlement, which was once a leper colony.<\/p>\n
First a boy with his football cane to us to say hello and satisfy his curiosity. He was follow by his a bit older sister. Asking her about the head of the village she brought us to the “kape’s”‘ house. The kape is chief of the village and needs to be asked to anchor the bay and walk around in and around the village. Unfortunately he was not at home. So we will pay our respect tomorrow and present him kava roots, the traditional and obligatory present on Fiji<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
With the first daylight wer lifted the hook and went towards the pass through the outer reef. It turned out, as expected the WPT from Don, was perfect. So we went through the pass without any concerns. Thereafter it was pretty easy. With a bit of wind on the nose we had no choice but […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1452","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-16"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sosx.de\/cat-mare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1452","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sosx.de\/cat-mare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sosx.de\/cat-mare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sosx.de\/cat-mare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sosx.de\/cat-mare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1452"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sosx.de\/cat-mare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1452\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sosx.de\/cat-mare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1452"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sosx.de\/cat-mare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1452"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sosx.de\/cat-mare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1452"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}