As always there's some cleaning up to do after guests depart. Our guests are generally wonderful and leave nothing out of order but you still need to wash sheets, wipe down heads and all of that.

After a slow morning of relaxing and cleaning we decided to snorkel out to the floating dock on the sand bar. It was a good long invigorating swim. We saw sting rays and eagle rays on our swim along with many little fish hanging about the various isolated coral heads. Once there we climbed up on the dock, which is some work as it is a good two or three feet above the water with no ladder. We took some great pictures and jumped off a few times before heading back.

You need to be careful out this way when swimming because many jet skis and power boats use this route. In all the hustle over the pas few days I had not managed to recover our dive flag, which would have been a useful safety precaution. On the way back we located it, almost vanished beneath the sand. I was surprised it was so well concealed after just a couple of days. I made one concerted effort to pick it up and had no problem clearing today as I swam straight down to the flag. I grabbed it and made a necessarily quick ascent from the 40 foot bottom. My free diving is not what it used to be, I need to practice. I feel lame being able to only barely recover items at 40 feet. We were recently chatting with friends on Arbuthnot (sp?) who were hunting at 60 feet in Fatu Hiva (and bringing back some big fish!).

We surveyed all of the coral heads between us and the exit around the west end of Toopua as we dinghied over to the NUI in the late afternoon for lunch/dinner. The weather is supposed to get fresh over the next few days and come around to the east southeast. Tonight into tomorrow would still be from the southwest though and getting up into the 20 knot range. This is fine for us even in an unsheltered anchorage but depending on how the reef breaks down the seas in this area the chop may make things no fun, killing the snorkeling and making dinghy rides wet.

We had another idyllic meal at the NUI. As at most resort here, the food was good (sometimes, but rarely, great) and very expensive. The dollar is so beat up and prices were so high to start with that a nice lunch for two runs about $100.

We had met a friendly pair of Japanese tourists at the Roulottes in Tahiti and after a short discussion we discovered their daughter worked at the NUI. As we walked back to the boat we ran across her and found out it was her last day working at the NUI. It was nice to chat with her after meeting her wonderful parents. We also discovered why the parents were out, she had just gotten married and was moving to France! Omedetou Naoko San!!

We were also trying to look up Elenore the guest relations manager who did such a wonderful job with our wedding. She had unfortunately relocated to the Saint Regis. We would have to try to visit her there.

We had a choppy ride back in the dingy. After considering conditions and the forecast we decided to move back to the bay by Bloody Mary's. It is a deep anchorage but it puts the island between you and the wind, and though it can be gusty because you can' get up close to the shore due to depth and reef at least the water is pretty flat. It also allows you to huge the coast in the dink and make reasonable trips to town or various other spots ashore. So we raised the hook and slowly motored through the windy channel around into the main bay. It struck me that this was the first time Hideko and I had been underway alone since Margarita Venezuela.