We stayed in Fakarava a bit longer than we originally intended due to weather. The grib files were predicting 25 knots of wind and better, which by itself is not that big a deal but the seas were predicted to be 12-14 feet at 6 seconds. That's called uncomfortable. Really uncomfortable.

So we waited. And while we were waiting we arranged to have dinner at the pension in Tetamanu, right there on the pass. The "dining room" for the pension is right over the water and reef, you can see colorful reef fish and not-so-colorful sharks swim under the floor. Annabelle and her husband Sanse run the pension and if you give them a bit of notice they will prepare a spectacular dinner for you. Because there were so many of us (ourselves, Elusive, Blue Plains Drifter, and Baraka) the spread was quite impressive: coconut curried chicken, freshly caught fried parrot fish, pasta, rice and a lovely salad. And coconut pie for dessert. Annabelle was a lovely hostess and earned big points with us when she immediately recruited Maddie to help with the "bookkeeping"- complete with calculator. Maddie was in her element!

And then we waited some more. Finally we decided to move back up to the northern anchorage to wait for the weather to improve. The northern anchorage offered a couple of advantages: first, it has a store so we could get some more supplies (can you say "baguette"?) and second, the northern pass is much wider and deeper then the southern one so our time of departure isn't quite so critically tied to the tide.

Finally the swell period lengthened and the wind lightened up a bit so headed out for the 240 mile passage to Papeete, Tahiti.