Sunday 9th May 2010

After having our passports stamped and getting our clearance papers, we were talking again to the ‘tourism’ lady we had spoken to on our arrival. She asked if we had any dvd’s that we didn’t want anymore so we headed back to the boat to get a few for her. In return she said we could choose a stamp from the collection she had on the table, which was pretty cool – I wouldn’t think that many people would have a stamp from Kiribati. But no, she didn’t mean one stamp, she meant one collection of stamps! We said no at first, as some of the stamps were $10 and $15, but she insisted. Then we offered to buy them, but still she wouldn’t hear of it and so we were lucky enough to walk away with a collection of Kiribati stamps!


We got back to the boat and were greeted with an almighty stink from the holding tank. We couldn’t face 10 days of sailing with that stench so Stu decided to have one last crack at fixing the macerator pump problem. As much as we tried to avoid it eventually we had to give in and the result was a bilge filled with waste and a boat that reeked to high heaven. We did find the problem though – the impellor in the macerator pump is broken, which we should hopefully be able to fix in Samoa – and after a fair amount of bilge pumping, holding tank cleaner and disinfectant we had a clean bilge and a boat that no longer stank. Luckily, because Phillip and Laurence came over an hour later to say goodbye.

We decided to delay our departure until tomorrow as it was now about 4:00pm and we like to have at least half a day of sunlight to get ourselves back in the routine and (for me, anyway) to psych ourselves up for night watches and broken sleep.