Leaving this Paradise for Another
04 September 2012 | 19 47.4'S:168 23.4'W, Beverage Reef
Lisa

Back to Civilization
The beautiful water of Beveridge Reef was amazing. There was a ring of bright blue water that surrounded the inner edge of the reef for a few hundred yards - on the bottom of it was soft sand with 9-11 feet of depth. From there, the sand bottom dropped off immediately to 35 feet - where you see the darker blue water that made up most of the interior of the atoll. To think that only a few people have ever seen this place - I bet more people have climbed to the top of Mount Everest than have sailed to Beveridge Reef! And to approach it from the sea was fascinating. Out in the middle of this vast ocean, suddenly appears a thin strip of bright blue water on the horizon. Then the thin blue swath becomes larger until you can finally make out the breaking waves on the surrounding reef. I could not get a picture to capture everything. It was too cool. I think it would be cool if someone could look on Google Earth and see if Beveridge Reef can be seen from the sattelite imagery there - if you can see it, please let us know! If you use a location near 20:00.978S and 167:45.746W that should get you in the ball park.
We didn't get to explore it as we would have liked - there was a cool wreck sticking out of the water on the eastern edge of the reef. And the fish are suppose to be incredible - plentiful and huge, with no fear of people. But the weather just didn't want to cooperate. Bob and Ann came over on Saturday night for quesadillas and an enthralling game of Smart Ass! Then they had a most exciting dingy ride back to their boat in 25 knot winds in the dark. They had come over in their full up fowlies because it was such a wet ride over, but it was even worse for them getting back home. I had them wear a couple of our life jackets just in case! Fortunately, they made it back safe and sound, but that was the last we saw of them until this morning - it was just too windy out to make a safe dingy ride between boats in the evening.
So unfortunately, it is time to depart Beveridge Reef. The clock is a tickin, and we still have a stop in Niue before making our way to Tonga. John made some delicious quiches this morning, then we all weighed anchor around 11:30am. We had a little GPS anomaly that was affecting our heading on the way out the passage. Luckily, I had saved our incoming path through the passage on my iPad and we were able to use it to navigate our way, as well as follow Charisma safely out of the atoll. John had been mucking with a bunch of wiring yesterday, and whala - our true heading was all dorked up from some sort of NEMA data being routed thru the wrong thingy. But as always, John was able to debug the problem and had it all fixed before too long. We have about a 24 hour run to Niue, where we will probably spend at least 3-4 days. All for now!
Lisa