Manihi, Tuamotu

This morning I crossed over to the ocean side and walked along the tidal reef. Pools at the edge of the drop off are full of reef fish and ocean breakers. The flats look barren but are covered in table size crabs vigorously defending their patch of red brown rock, or scurrying under their boulder, beautiful colours on some of the species. Lift almost any rock and a gorgeous patterned grey/green eel shoots out, quite happy to travel overland to escape. I captured a Peacock Flounder, more by running him down than by spear. To the boat to drink a few coconuts for morning tea, then back to foraging. I bought a cast net in Martinique, but it's much smaller than the one I left at home, and has a spread of just two metres. Yesterday I was getting it over the fish, but they didn't have far to swim to escape it's drop. What does happen,is the reef sharks come by to see what made the splash. They are only to one and a half meters, but one did take a piece out of a lady's leg in WA. I'm sneaking along looking for mullet, goatfish, parrotfish when the shark that's almost run into the back of my legs notices me and does a big panic U-turn. That makes quite a splash so I make a bit of a splash too. I ended up with six of them keeping tabs on my netting. Today I had success and we have a few nice mullet in with the flounder. We are eating coconut crabs, sprouted coconut pancakes and tonight there will be coconut rice. We've been trying since Panama to buy the implement that turns a ripe coconut into half a cup of coconut cream. Every house has one, and you can only buy them in the big city, but I had a bright idea. Surely the Polynesians didn't wait thousands of years without coconut cream till metal arrived? So I found a nice grater-like lump of coral and tried that. It works! My hand feels like your feet if you walk on a coral beach but we have our coconut cream.
We are anchored at the top of the lagoon inside the attol of Manihi, in the Tuamotus. There is a village at the bottom and a pass to the ocean, then some shacks and houses coming half way up to us, on the string of 'motus' seperating the lagoon and ocean. We are quite alone up here. Haven't seen or heard any people or boats. Water is completely calm and turns a beautiful tropical pale green as it shallows to the sand and coconuts.
We had a very easy four day sail to get here. The trees are delivered to Xavier and I had a few hours with his internet so got a few photos to the blog. The locals in the village are extremely friendly and helpful, we were given a 'small' Meko, that's a fish. We ate it for two days and nothing was wasted, especially not the lips!