18:48.020 S   165:25.837  W

21/08/09

Yesterday Demetra and I went fishing with Simon and two other visitors. This entailed towing a smaller boat carrying the net across to an extreme corner of the lagoon at low tide, and then walking  across ¾ mile of coral in shallow water sometime having to carry the net boat.

I had oversize boots and found the coral walking pretty hard going. Suddenly Simon stopped, fed out  about 30-40 metres of net from the little boat and ran around in a big circle driving the fish towards the net and in less than three minutes had netted 29 Parrot Fish. This all happened in  about two feet of water.  He complained it was a small haul and had we been there an hour earlier there would have been much more. He filleted 4 fish for us.  We thoroughly enjoyed our few days in Palmerston.

We met a linguist who was dropped off by one of the other yachts;  After her first night ashore she had revised her view of paradise as there were rats running around her bedoom along with an invasion of crabs and the odd roach.

22/08/09  05:00

We left midday and had several hours of gentle spinnaker propulsion,  When the wind got down to 3 knots and we were dead in the water we took it down and we motored for 5 hours..  About 1 AM we were hit with 20 knots plus of unexpected South Westerly which is extremely unhelpful, but we were glad the Spi had been binned. We are planning to stop at Beveridge Reef, a tiny atoll in the middle of nowhere but the wind is taking us directly to Niue.

Sat Com returned  45 minutes after leaving Palmerston.

12:00

Yesterday we saw a bit of everything, the wind boxed the compass and went from 2 to 25 knots. We sailed as much as we could but only managed 140 miles, quite a bit of that under power.  The engine is on and we’re back on track for Beveridge Reef.

I attach an assortment of snaps from Palmerston.