The last few days were quite hectic aboard shimmi, mainly due to really crap weather, which culminated yesterday with gale force winds, causing our anchor to drag multiple times despite a muddy bottom with supposed good holding. Powerful 40 knot gusts would hammer into shimmi, so eventually we decided to change anchors. I have a oversized Danforth anchor which has never been used, so I thought "now is the time". Once the big anchor was on the end of the chain we did not drag again! Of course as soon as we changed anchors the wind started moderating. Prior to these strong winds, (which according to weather guru Bob McDavit is another of those dreaded squash zones), we had a great day on a beautiful white beach. 6 local ladies emerged from the water, having spent the previous 3 hours catching reef fish with their gill net. Indie was mesmerized by a giant green box fish, similar to the one which almost killed Bart Simpson. Liz of course was collecting shells like crazy, we had to draw the line when she wanted to fly home with a giant clam. This was later followed by an awesome surf at a cranking mini version of Teahupoo. Yours truly had about 30 pigdog barrels. Perfect head high to overhead waves were going seriously square over the reef, as round as drain pipes. Jacques took a bunch of pics, so we have the proof, unfortunately we wont be posting any pics on the blogs for a while, there is no internet here, we are too close to the edge of the world. By the way, Jacques showed one of the locals, Jesse, how to operate his R20000 Canon and take surf pics. Jesse ended up banging off more than 500 pics on the motor drive, including more than one complete barrel sequence! If you splice all the pics together you almost have a video of our surf, hahaha.
We have been hanging out with the villagers next to our anchorage, swapping kiddie toys and fishing gear for fruit. Strangely enough they have solar panels and a satelite dish, and they invited us to watch Saturday's trinations rugby game on TV! But later today we will wave goodbye to Matuku and set sail for the legendary Frigates Pass, a 100 miles of rough seas and strong tail winds lie ahead of us, luckily it should all be from behind. We will probably start the sail with a double reefed main. Anyway, we have had shimmi out in similar conditions when we sailed through that hectic squash zone to Western Samoa, so we are not so green anymore, I know how to set shimmi's sails for these conditions, and luckily its only a 100 miles, we are going to try time it so that we arrive at daybreak.
Bula!
G