October 14, 2012
After a peaceful night in Port Maurelle, we were quite contented to just stay there. But as so often happens in cruising, a friend will reach out and get you moving again.
We called our friends on Bright Angel to see where they were, and Bob told us about this wonderful bay they were in, #11. He urged us to come on over as it’s very protected, has room, and is well worth seeing. He told us our friends on Local Talent had just arrived, and that if we came over, we could all have dinner at the nearby Spanish restaurant. (We had heard the restaurant’s amazing, and there was a little floating houseboat art gallery I wanted to see, too.)
All this was too good an offer to refuse; so in spite of the wind, we pulled up our anchor and headed out for the motoring trip to Ano Beach/Tapana Island (#11). Ano Beach is actually on the same island as Neiafu, about a half hour away by car. Tapana is an island just off the end of the point, separated by a very shallow channel about 100 ft in width.
The trip over was windy with occasional splashes of water into the cockpit. We didn’t even bother to put up the sail as the wind was right on the nose! We made it in about 2 hours, and the wind died off as we entered this very sheltered bay. We were back in a calm, peaceful world again, and this place just seemed magical.
After we picked up a mooring, we got into our dinghy and headed over to see our friends on Local Talent. Sabina was swimming and cavorting with these big beautiful fish. She had fed them, and the fish responded by staying with her and even letting her touch them. We also went to visit the Ark Gallery, a floating houseboat the artist Sheri and her husband, Larry, live on and use as a gallery to display and sell her paintings and prints. Her work is beautiful and it would be very difficult to leave her place empty-handed. I ended up buying a small painting for our boat, and I treasure it.
When we headed back to our boat we had a sighting of Missy, the local sea turtle. Already it had been well worth the effort to come here, and in the coming days it would become one of our favorite places in the South Pacific. -Cyndi
