Wednesday 12th  June, Maskelyne Islands, Malakula, Vanuatu  16:32.7S  167:45.4E 

Today’s Blog by Ted (Time zone BST +10.00; UTC +11.00)

Yesterday’s passage from Efate was exhilarating (average speed of 8.5 knots from anchor to anchor across 60nm), and we arrived in Laman Bay, Epi by mid afternoon. The fresh breeze from ashore made snorkelling uninviting. Instead we stripped down the windlass…

…….a misnomer in our case as we were close to being blown off the bow by the gusts. For the skipper it is de rigueur!

A pre-dinner game of Scrabble brought out the competitor in all of us. At one stage we thought Terry was doomed to a night in the lazarette, after a word challenge on Lenie.

My turn at cooking the meal involved Chorizo sausages, potato mash & peas, which I thought would keep the Brits happy. As I write, David is preparing tonight’s meal which apparently incorporates the two left over bangers.

Today we dinghied to the wharf and made the obligatory requests to wander about in the village, under sunny skies. The locals were friendly and permission was granted.

At the north western corner of the bay there’s a small landing strip and a group of village huts. We meandered along the esplanade made of white coral bits and bordered by large trees & firs. We passed by the high school which had recent additions partly funded by Australia, and supports 300 students. However the village was almost empty. Apparently a third of the locals were in New Zealand, fruit picking. Our stroll took us past the ‘resort’ (devoid of guests), the primary school and a small store where the skipper topped up his local phone sim card.

We returned to the dinghy and Serendipity for lunch. After a siesta we loaded the tender with snorkelling gear and proceeded to seek out Bondas, the local dugong or sea cow. They grow to around 3 metres and weigh over 100kg, which is a hell of a lot of sea grass. Alas, they eluded us, but we did manage to swim with some large sea turtles.

Hence my pidgin subject heading. Loosely translated as: the blog belonging to the Frog (our yacht mascot, for the uninitiated) whose crew didn’t get to put eyes on a Dugong.