June 29, 2008 Position:
South 16 degrees 49 minutes
East 177 degrees 27 minutes
Hard to believe June is almost over. We ended up staying 4 nights in Blue Lagoon. It was very comfortable there (no ocean swell to keep us up at night) with nice views and good snorkeling. Big excitement yesterday was finding a large reddish colored octopus on the reef where we were snorkeling. He (she?) was not more than 5 feet below us and was quite large. He saw us and blinked a lot, and then instead of hiding like they usually do, he decided to show off a bit and proceeded to slink in and out of little crags in the coral, spread out its arms, turned upside down, did some amazing camouflaging (it went from being reddish purple to looking exactly like the reef, complete with bumps and fissures right before our eyes), and played a little with a huge grouper that was nestled in next to him. Very cool.
We decided it was time to get away from the cruise ships that come into Blue Lagoon every day so today we headed north to another anchorage. We are still traveling in tandem with our friends on Vera. Our new anchorage is on Yasawa Island and is called Land Harbour and it is the farthest north in the Yasawa Island chain that we will be going.
It was only a 12 mile sail (motor actually) – but right in the middle of it we had to traverse an area that was exceptionally shallow. As with most of the waters around here, it was not accurately charted for depth so we had been proceeding cautiously, but still it is always scary to suddenly see the coral heads right under you – with just a few feet of water between the bottom of your boat and the coral. We managed to make it through, but not without getting our fishing line snagged on coral and losing the fishing yo-yo (holds the fishing line) and a couple hundred feet of fishing line and a good lure. Oh, well – certainly could have been worse.
In a few days we will be heading back to Lautoka (about 50 miles south-east of here) and check out to begin our trip to Vanuatu.
L.