We arrived in Manihi yesterday. The entrance to the atoll was a little sketchy, there being a current and a bunch of shallow areas on either side, though apparently this is one of the easier atolls to get in and out of. Manihi isn't one of the larger atolls, but is nonetheless impressive in its size, being miles and miles across... hard to imagine this is the coral remnant of such a large island. We also noticed that our ship's chart plotter maps did have detailed information on the atoll so we had to pull out our iPad and use that for navigating in the atoll. While the water is generally 50-100ft deep, there are all sorts of shallow areas you can identify by the light color of the water and sometime with a buoy. Interestingly, there are a number of houses built on stilts in some of the shallow areas that we still haven't figured out the purpose of.

We dinghied into the town and walked around yesterday. We are about 1nm from the town's boat area and had a nice ride in with the wind at our back. We walked around the town... probably several hundred inhabitants... but it was quiet the day being Sunday. We found a food shack with a cold Cragmont brand cola (that is the Lucky Supermarket's generic... they still make that? funny the generics that make their way down here b/c of course there isn't a Lucky Supermarket here). The dinghy ride back was miserable as the winds where whipping up tall (for a dinghy) waves that we had to slow down for but then when we would go slow the winds would blow lots of water onto us. We had pulled out our last set of fresh clothes only to be drenched in salt water.

The Kttywake was in the anchorage. Tim and Rebecca had been running the Pacific Net on our crossing from the Galapagos and had been the ones to hand the running of the net to us. They invited us over for a glass of wine with them and their kids that had just joined them. We felt bad that all we had left was box wine and brought a bag of pretzels, only to find box wine was what they had on the Kittywake as well which lets us know our box wine is ok for entertaining purposes. They had just made a similar crossing to our own from the Marquesas, but had lost their autopilot on the way. Luckily, they had 4 people to rotate the steering between, but the kids were not happy to have their sailing adventure begin in this fashion.

Dana woke up today finding the bunches of bananas we had been given in Hiva Oa were now ripe enough to eat. She informed Mark that she had plowed through 6 of them already. She had been eyeing them for several days, coming up will all sorts of plans for what to cook with them when they were ready.

We have some repair work to do today. We'll probably go snorkling this afternoon. There is a hotel with a nice restaurant on the far side of the atoll that we would like to go for dinner, but we can't do that in our dinghy under these conditions, to say nothing of all the shallow areas we would not be able to identify at night. We may try go have lunch lunch there.