We arrived in Suwarrow this morning.
Apii and James, the Rangers, came over in their boat and we did the formalities. Friendly, easy, just a bit of paperwork and 50 USD.
15 other boats were here already. What's the attraction? This is a marine park, far away from any supplies or other islands. The rangers are a great bunch and organize pot-lucks, fishing, snorkeling, scuba tours. They just have a little aluminum boat, the yachties bring the fuel. For pot-luck dinner the rangers supply the fish, the yachties do the rest.
It goes so far that we can get water here, even a shower. This is unheard of in the Tuamotus, which have a constant water shortage. Here the roof of the ranger's house catches enough rain (it does have more squalls here) and the water is collected in a basin.
Other activities: Collect garbage from the shores and burn it, together with the garbage collected from the yachts. Today James, the ranger demonstrated how to make Coconut-cakes. Tomorrow night there is a lobster hunt. An all night event on another island. Too risky to cross the lagoon at night, the rangers say. Go there by sunset, wait for the night, grab lobsters from the reef (hopefully there is no moray in that hole), then sleep on a piece of tarp on that island, return in the morning with the rangers boat. We might skip that, we need some sleep.
For us this is a bit too much organization, but many like it this way. About half the boats here are from the US.
Feeling lazy after the passage we didn't do much. We did put a piece of shrimp on a hook and tried our luck on reef fish. After trying to entice the fish for 1/2 hour we gave up and let the piece of shrimp on the line hang in the water. Suddenly the reel went off and we reeled in a nice size parrot fish.
We usually don't fish around the reefs. Ciguaterra is a serious risk. But we had asked the ranger whether they have fish poisoning in this area, they said no. We also learned that Ciguaterra seems to occur when coral is sick, mainly due to intervention by humans. This place is so far out of the way, the coral is healthy, no Ciguaterra they say. We ate the parrot fish fillets with a couple of shrimps for lunch. Delicious.
Sharks are abound in the anchorage, just dropping the anchor caused a shark to come by and find out what is going on. No swimming at night they say.
We will be here until the winds pick up again, we had to motor the last night to get here. Then it is a "short" run of 450 miles (3 nights) to Pago Pago, Samoa.
