18/5/2015 0 Comments Suwarrow Island, Cook Islands, what a little gem! Our own Robinson Crusoe paradise.Suwarrow Island, Cook Islands, what a little gem! Our own Robinson Crusoe paradise.
Suwarrow Island was finally reached on the morning of our 7th day at sea, & what a little gem it turned out to be. Surrounded by reef, & other out of bounds protected Islands it was truly magic. Not so easy to reach we had to navigate through very shallow waters, with reef below us & through an opening in the reef to reach a shallow mooring where we dropped anchor. There is a ranger & his wife living on the Island & they also act as customs & immigration officers for entry to the Cook Islands. He spends 8 months on the Island & leaves during cyclone season. He did say he had only arrived 2 days ago for this season so we were pretty much the first boat he had checked in. & really the Island wasn’t open until 1st June, oh well we were here now & didn’t really want to leave quite yet. We radioed him & he told us not to come ashore until he had done all our papers, so we sat on the boat & waited & realized that the boat was surrounded by circling SHARKS, about 11 of them in all that just kept circling & circling, we joked they were the rangers Rottweiler’s keeping an eye on us, something very James Bond about it!!!! So we waited for harry to arrive & by this time we were joined by another yacht with Swedish couple on board, so Harry had a very busy morning ahead. When he did come over we found him to be very friendly New Zealand educated man, who we later found out used to be a pearl diver (always handy to know one of them) who in his hey day could dive up to 18m without a tank.!!! He let us know that the circling sharks were not dangerous, they were black tips but not to throw food overboard as that WOULD bring the bad guys or sharks in, but yes it was safe for us to swim. With trepidation I let my fellow crew members swim for awhile before I entered the waters, then you couldn’t really keep me out. We snorkeled & walked around the 1km by 300m Island , Svend & I collected washed up plastic bottles that were littering the shore line, and enjoyed being on land for the rest of the day. The Island is literally covered in coconut trees & sprouting coconut trees & alive with moving crabs, from tiny ones to massive coconut breaking, tree living & climbing blue crabs, most of the crabs are hermit crabs that live in various abandoned shells until they out grow them & find a bigger one, so you see the paths alive with moving sea shells of all kinds, some nice, some attractive or ugly, just like human dwellings, all shapes & sizes & in states of repair & attractiveness. Svend & swam back to the boat & snorkeled surrounded by the ever present sharks, that you had to tell your mind ‘were NOT ‘ dangerous. I was pretty happy to reach the boat even so. The sharks also kept us company at night & could be seen in our spot lights still circling which kept us entertained until we went to bed for our first still nights sleep for quite a while, with no night watch to get up for….. bliss! We stayed another day but decided reluctantly (I could have stayed a week there) to get 14 hours under our belt of our next 5 days trip to Samoa by leaving at night. Another two boats had arrived during our stay & one of these left at the same time as us, it was a catamaran & had a lightly faster trip out over the reef than us as it sits higher in the water so they soon left us behind. Unfortunately it didn’t take long into the night to remember why I really am not a sailor, when the wind whipped up & sails were lashing everywhere , people had to go on the front deck to take down poles & adjust tangles in the pitch black with only a torch lighting the night, boat banging around, an adrenalin rush if you are into that, but I can never get the thought out of my mind that I am 4 or 5 days from land & how vulnerable we really are. Svends decided he’s not a sailor despite being on board for over 4 months now & being very competent, & very good at repairs in all shapes & forms, Tinas not a big fan of the wild nights & long passages, however Maureen & Mark seem to love it as does Clive & Mona who have done plenty of sailing before. We’ve decided we won’t be buying a boat & spending the rest of our lives sailing (as many we have met have done, sold everything & this is now home) but chartering wouldn’t be out of the question, in the Whitsundays or wherever we fancied it, we just have other things we’d rather do than long passages of saiing on open seas, watching movies, reading books or suduko. Still its been a great experience & we are happy we were included in the trip.
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