"Dinner's ready" Manjula said, "It's 15,000 feet deep here". Now
there are a couple of phrases you don't put together every day. We are
underway again after departing what we will refer to as Tern Atoll.
Tern, (not its real name), is a wildlife sanctuary that requires
special permission to land...permission that we lacked. Going with my
general philosophy, "Ask forgiveness not permission" we
decided to give it a look. Truth be told, I may very well have bypassed
this place had Manjula not been so persistent in suggesting we at least
go near. It turns out that I am more of a worry wart than Manjula. To me
the notion of going to a poorly charted atoll that is declared off
limits is risky. We would have to sail 48 hours and try to arrive in
good daylight in order to see any uncharted reefs or shoals. Then we would approach dangerously close to the waves breaking on the reef and try to find a place to anchor. Then we would try to land our dinghy on the coral reef and go ashore while if the wind changed direction, or the current or tide switched, Endless Summer would end up on the reef. There we would be on our forbidden little island. People do visit these small rocks in the sea, but normally they leave one person on board the boat, ready to up anchor at a moments notice if the conditions change; and they don't spend the night. As there are only two of us on board, that doesn't sound like fun.

But Manjula is not deterred: "I'm sure we can go there.", "Don't you think we can go there?", "It looks on the chart like there is a place we could anchor.", and, "I bet we can anchor there." Under this irrefutable logic, I eventually crumble and agree to at least go by and see what the situation looks like, with the knowledge that it may indeed prove to be an amazing place.
We are posting this entry in several installments so that we can post more pictures. As you can see from the photo at the top of this posting, we indeed made it into the atoll.