Some things come to mind that we forget to pass along because we take them for granted now or have become accustomed to many things here that would seem cool, interesting or just odd from home or the comfort of your arm chair or office chair while cruising the internet or reading blogs on company time. Hey good for you either way. There are very few bugs out at anchor save the odd mosquito and some no no's (no see ums) the odd wasp or bee but super comfy to sleep with hatches open all night and not get driven nuts by bugs. Ashore it is not much worse and as mentioned there are no poisonous things, spiders, snakes or anything in all of FP that are a danger to humans, very civilized indeed

The drums! As we had hoped when thinking about seeing the South Pacific, there are nearly always the sounds of drums coming from shore wherever we are anchored. All types of beats and rhythms and accompanipying instruments even banjos from time to time and then there is the singing. Great singers, probably a result of the dedicated church singing throughout recent history. So we benefit each evening from the sounds of historic beats long used for comunications and now over time adjusted to try to maintain historic value and even for entertainment these days. All the vegetation grows at a rapid pace as one might expect down here and daily cuttings are raked into piles and burned so there is always smoke wafting into air. The combination of palm fronds smoke and tropical beats coming out from shore and the warm humid air makes for the feeling of being in an exotic far away port, hey wait a second, guess we are.

Most of us west coast yachties are accustomed to sheltered anchoring in a bay or cove or up against or behind some wind and or wave protection but out here things are usually a bit different. Once inside a fringing reef you are mostly protected from swells but not always from the winds. Fringing coral reefs are the very thing that makes it possible to cruise around these tropical islands in comfort and relative safety. They are quite visible as the water colour changes from cobalt blue to robins egg blue and lighter, even to light yellows with dark spots and lines of coral just below the surface. The seas, unabated for hundreds or even thousands of miles rear up as the sea bed shallows very rapidly and create real surf, big curls that thunder down on top of the reef as their travels are brought to an abrupt halt, dissipating into what seems nothing but a bit of foam and spray if there is a counter breeze. This water that has now entered the "ring" of coral sort of like a moat really, around the island, needs to go somewhere because every few seconds all the way around the island, millions and millions of tons of water flood into the pond. Most fringing reefs are not solid and have small passes here and there that relieve the pressure of all that water but for the most part it just finds ways to equalize and combined with a bit of tide very interesting currents develop creating conditions not unlike the La Paz Waltz for those that have experienced it. So once inside the reef you are still exposed to winds but can really anchor anywhere it is shallow enough and be relatively safe, relatively speaking. In essence the reef, as described by Gasteau of the boat Bidule when we were talking one day and I mentioned all that surf coming in and how it took some getting used too stated "there is surf, yes" as he swept his arm towards the reef just a dozen yards off their beam, " but,,,we have a fence"! Nothing could describe it better, here we sit behind the imagined security of our fence separated from all that is scary and bad, just like sitting in the back yard at home. Think I'll live dangerously today and jump over the side and have a peek at the prop, maybe even spend some time in the water!