Yesterday morning we woke without the alarm, but it was still at 0500, so we decided to catch up with Keenan then take an early morning walk to the boulangerie for freshly baked French pastries and fruit juice.

Once we'd consumed that while sitting on cut off logs outside the boulangerie, we took a short stroll to some of the nearby ruins from when Ile des Pins was a French penal colony. We completed a rather long walk with a stroll on the beautiful powdery white beach of Baie De Kuto, before stopping for a coffee at the local restaurant and heading over to Baie de Kanumera. The photographs of the views we enjoyed hopefully speak for themselves. Simply stunning!

It hasn't been all play though. Yesterday Elaine gave the dinghy a much needed clean, since it still had remnants of volcanic ash from Tanna Island in Vanuatu and bright orange dust from our hike up to Cap Ndoua in Anse Majic. We also no ticed something odd about our SSB /HF radio when we tried to call into the magnet yesterday, given that we haven't used it since our passage from New Zealand to Fiji. Our suspicions were confirmed this morning with our failed radio check. Roy then spent the rest of the morning replacing the high voltage cable between the ATU and the antenna as well as soldering the connections on the ATU Control cable, all of which had corroded. A left over gremlin from our passage from hell when all the waves were breaking into the starboard engine compartment while Roy repaired the steering sheath and where this unit is housed. He also tackled our stern navigation light which speed working again.

Elaine enjoyed a day of pottering around while repairing our velcro holds for the cockpit cushions, updating our log books, cleaning all the mud of our hiking shoes in preparations for our biosecurity check in Australia and making some edits to our blog postings that, for some strange reason, are omitting the paragraph formats.

A turtle and a dugong was curious enough to surface near Paw Paw as well. Guess they also wanted to take a peek at all the activity onboard!