After a fantastic nights sleep (the boat was almost still for once) we were awakened abruptly by the radio, someone was obviously an insomniac, I mean who is awake at 6am????

But rather than it being a totally negative experience, there was a positive, as the lagoon was like a mill pond and the sun was just rising.

It seemed it was to be a day of negatives with a positive spin. I had been longing to walk along the beautiful white sandy beaches that were temptingly only a hundred metres from the boat. So much so that I took the dinghy over to one of the islands.

This is no small thing, whilst I am capable of dinghying ashore, I rarely do, because I do not like it. I find lifting the outboard difficult as it is so heavy.  But I was itching to do some beachcombing, as I had not had the opportunity in the past 5 months.

As I waded ashore, pulling the dinghy behind me (it was too shallow to get ashore in the dinghy) I was disappointed to see that my beautiful white sandy beach was no such thing, it was made up of broken coral, pebbles and shells.

It had all been an illusion. It reminded me of when I once worked with a circus, how glamorous the costumes had seemed from afar, but up close they were jaded and tawdry, just like my beach.

I couldn’t help thinking how it was a bit like a cemetery, full of dead coral that had once been a vibrant, colourful reef. The shells too were broken and bleached. What a disappointment it was after such expectations, maybe that was the problem, I had built up such high expectations??

The afternoon was spent baking and preparing for the barbeque that was being held on the ‘beach’ at sunset.

By now there were 6 boats in the anchorage and everyone dinghied ashore for sundowners. As usual I was covered from head to foot least I became supper for the nonos (Polynesian for no-see-ums). I was later pleasantly surprised to find I didn’t need to cover up.

But as the night wore on and we sat around the fire we all commented on how nice it was that there was no sand. Firstly, there weren’t any nonos and secondly there was no sand getting into everything. So now my disappointing beach had redeemed itself, or maybe my glass was half full instead of half empty?

The children from 'Merlin' and 'Emily Grace' had spent the day collecting fire wood for the fire, they had also built little benches from driftwood and coconuts for us to sit on and had made a little shelter (which came in useful later on, but that’s another story!!)

Everyone had brought food for our ‘pot luck’ bbq and the evening was a perfect temperature, with clear skies and almost a full moon.

Later on some of the guys went lobster hunting. You simply walk along the reef shelf and grab them as they scuttle by?? Well that’s the theory, but they came back empty handed. Although they did see lots of moray eels and Roger rescued a parrot fish that had become stranded.

Never mind, there’s always another night!

One by one the different crews drifted back to their boats, leaving Lucy , Jamie, Roger and I to enjoy the stars. Finally, we made our back to our boat.

It had been a lovely night and it was interesting to find that we were not the only ones who had not had an evening bbq (braai) on the beach for such a long time. For us, the last time was in 2006 at Wardrick Wells in the Bahamas. I think one of the reasons it happens so rarely is because of the no-see-ums.