It rained last night and the day started very overcast with periods of rain. We still had the dinghy motor to contend with. Not the best start to the day. After fiddling on the dinghy motor for a while we add more gas to the motor and tried it again. Lo and behold it worked. Best we can guess the gas had water in it. Whatever, it’s working again. On top of that, it was still overcast but no longer raining.
We kept the dinghy motor running while we quickly got ready to go ashore. The motor got us to shore with no further problems. We tied the dinghy to a tree and walked to the scooter rental location. Once we had our scooter we headed to the natural pool in Baie de Oro. We parked the dinghy at the Meriden. Here are pictures of the Meriden’s very pretty entrance.
We walked about 20 minutes to the natural pool. The natural pool floods at high tide and then becomes isolated as the tide goes out. Any fish that come in with the high tide are trapped until the next high tide. It was about mid tide when we arrived. It was really lovely. Lots of white sand, turquoise water, green pine trees, and even a little sun.
There were about 10 people there, a couple of them were snorkeling. We had brought our snorkel gear but it wasn’t very warm so we opted not to snorkel. We walked in the pool and fish swam around our feet.
After enjoying the pool for a while we hopped back on our scooter and drove to Baie de Gadji which is the other major bay on Ile des Pins. On the way to Gadji we stopped at the grocery store for some eggs.
Like Oro, Gadji is very shallow. Now we understand why we couldn’t anchor in either of these bays. Had we anchored in navigable water we wouldn’t have been able to make it ashore in the dinghy.
I tried to walk out to the water but the sand was like quick sand. Here is a picture of my footprints.
A man and his son were selling coconuts so we enjoyed fresh coconut water and coconut meat while admiring the bay. Here are some pictures.
Throughout the morning we had overcast skies with periods of sun. The forecast said thunderstorms were expected in the afternoon so we figured we should just get back to the boat. We drove back to Kuto, dumped our snorkel gear and new provisions in the dinghy and then drove back to the rental “office” (it was really someone’s porch) to return the scooter. On our way back we stopped at a hotel to check out their restaurant for lunch. This is the first meal we have eaten out in New Caledonia. It was very good and the view was amazing. Here are pictures.
We returned to the boat. Fortunately, no problems with the dinghy motor. We felt like even though the day didn’t start off so well we recovered and had a nice day exploring a beautiful island.
Once back at the boat, I tried to log onto the internet to buy more data for our sim card. Unfortunately, the website would not accept our credit cards. While we were struggling with this our boat neighbors came over to introduce themselves and to invite us to their boat for sundowners. At 5:00 we headed over to Avante to have drinks with Bill and Susan. We had a really nice time. They are from Telluride and Scottsdale and have a lot of experience sailing around here, so we picked their brains about their experiences sailing to the Loyalty Islands, etc. We really enjoyed ourselves and hope our paths cross again soon. They will be in New Zealand while we’re there, so maybe . . . .
We came back to the boat and relaxed before another early night.
Originally we were going to leave Ile des Pins tomorrow but we need to deal with this issue of internet access so we are staying put for another day. It’s important because that how we get our weather updates so we don’t want to be sailing blind!