Still nowhere, Palmerston Reef
Moxie - Beck Family Adventure
Mike, Denise, Asia and Aranya Beck
Fri 22 Aug 2014 20:31
We are still at Palmerston Reef, have now been joined by 4 other boats. Yesterday was perfect weather sunny and calm we went snorkelling and found three huge anchors from a wreck at the north end of the atoll and also bagged a couple more crays. The crays here are big, they have huge long spidery legs on them, quite different to what I am used to. Snorkelling here is really incredible, the water clarity is around 100 feet and the inside ring of coral is shallow, 6 to 10 feet, we have morays, the normal reef fish, sharks, rays, and some very big snapper, trevally and grouper. Most successful dive was to retrieve a 9.9 Yamaha that Apogee dropped into 40 feet of water. Amazingly they had it going again within a couple of hours!
We did a bit of fun fishing the other day, here the challenge is not catching a fish rather it is not letting the fish get caught. It takes about 30 seconds to catch a trevally, they are everywhere as are huge snapper and numerous other fish. Once you hook something there's a six second window to land it before the sharks nail him. Unfortunately we are not eating any of he reef fish as we are not sure what he situation is with ciguatera here and it's not worth the risk. Feeding the sharks is huge fun though and instead of fresh snapper we have been putting up with Mahi Mahi, Wahoo, Marlin and crayfish meals.
The weather has been pretty drab other than yesterday, today is back to windy and rough again. The water is cold so we have been swimming in wetsuits which makes quite a change.
The girls have made hammocks using a fishing net that we found stuck on the reef, they attempted a sleepover in them last night is was rough and quite windy, they were swinging like crazy. Anyway they toughed it out until the wee hours when they finally succumbed to the cold.
We are waiting here a couple more days for a weather window to carry on to Nuie, In Nuie the only landing is by dinghy at a cliff face, there is then a crane to lift the tender up on to the dock where they have trolleys waiting. Nuie is one of the smallest countries in the world, so small in fact that there is no ATM machine. Currently the swell is too big there to be able to land the dinghy.
Mike, Denise, Asia and Aranya Beck
SV Moxie
http://blog.mailasail.com/moxie