Almost alone
03 June 2008 | Baie Uie, at anchor
John and Shauna
We dropped anchor this afternoon in 5 metres of water on a red mud bottom in Baie Uie. This is a magnificent anchorage - steep mountains on both sides enclosing a bay which has its entrance facing West and its head almost East. This gives perfect protection from the ESE trade winds which are honking at 25 knots today outside. The head of the bay is horseshoe-shaped and one needs to anchor quite a long way out since it shoals quite a long way out from the shore. The beach is fine coral pebbles with some red-brown pebbles from the surrounding hills and mountains which are red with iron and other minerals. We took the dinghy ashore to what seemed like a deserted cove lined with coconut palms and low sub-tropical shrubs. On the way we passed schools of little bait fish and several small brown manta rays. We beached the dinghy and out of the bushes emerged Jacques, a Frenchman who told us he was born in Sydney and now lives here in splendid isolation in a little shack, built under a grove of coconuts just back from the beach. He seemed a bit eccentric but very affable and friendly. He showed us a potable water standpipe fed from a fresh water stream at the base of the mountain on the South side of the beach, and then led us to a track winding up the mountain behind the bay. We climbed this and got a panoramic view of not only Baie Uie but of the Southern Lagoon out to the entrance at Amedee Lighthouse. There are two rivers flowing into the bay, and tomorrow at high tide we will follow them up as far as we can in the inflatable. An interesting feature of the South-East coast of New Caledonia are the wind farms along all the tops of the mountain ranges - dozens and dozens of huge two-bladed wind generators on extraordinarily tall towers, taking advantage of the consistent trade wind flow to supplement the island's electricity supply. We took some pictures of these today and hope to post them on the blog next week when in Internet territory. We spoke to Andrew and Margaret on "Mollycoddle" tonight via VHF - they are at anchor at Amedee Lighthouse and not having as peaceful a time swell-wise as we are here, so they will probably come over this way tomorrow - we will very likely move around to Baie de Prony tomorrow and probably meet them there.