A Picnic

A few days after meeting the village people we were pretty good friends with them.  We invited them onto our boat for a short sail to a beach everyone called the Sand Spit because a long spit of sand wound out from the beach at low tide.  In the morning at 9:00 we picked up our hostess sand a couple of her friends.  There was Mere our hostess, her uncle, his daughter her niece, Meres husband Jone, and two girls who were just friends.  

We reached the Sand Spit and everyone suited up in their swim suits for a fun day at the beach!  I rigged the sailing dinghy and took Cleo and Archie to the beach, everyone else followed, swimming paddling or sailing to shore.  Some of the village people set up a shelter of saplings and palm fronds using nothing but machetes.  We split into groups, the little kids preferring to stay by the beach and play in the shallows while my dad and two village men took Cleo and Jasper spearfishing and two more village people went to catch coconut crabs for lunch.  I went with David, Sam, Archie and a village boy called Tua to catch some fish in the small salt water pools on the other side of the island.  We didn’t catch anything with our rods but Tua succeeded in catching five small fish with nothing but a rock.

We went back to the Sand Spit empty-handed but we’d had fun, Tua had taught us how to use the pieces of coral littered on the beach to catch small fish to use as live bait, but we still caught nothing.  When we returned to the beach I was hot and bothered from the mosquitos and sun on the beach, I caught a ride with one of the boys in the kayaks and went back to our boat for a cool off and spent half an hour by myself just chilling. I went back when I saw everybody gathering in the shelter for lunch.  I got to the beach just in time to get some lunch.  Everybody had participated in making the meal, the two people who had gone crabbing had brought back two huge coconut crabs the size of my head.  The spearfishing group had speared 5 fish which had been roasted over the fire until they were nice and crispy.

The food was awesome and after we were done we set up a soccer field and played a game of soccer.  My team won and and it was really fun playing in the sand.  We swam back to the boat and I took a shower while we sailed back to the village anchorage.