Olimarao

Another short sail (one and a half days) bring us to Olimarao, an uninhabited atoll. The pass again is not as straightforward as the charts suggest, but with Michela as by now seasoned reef spotter we have no troubles getting in, just the usual stroke of anxiety when seeing bright rocks in the clear water slide under the hull. While motoring up to the beach a loud pop and smell of exhaust...I look at the temperature gauge and it's shooting up to 90 degrees Celsius!
Great, some kind of serious failure right in the middle of nowhere.
The engine holds on until we anchor, but I'm too tired to dig right into the problem, I give myself a day's rest. The snorkeling is superb, with the bulk of the island in front ant its sand dunes extending from the extremities giving us shelter and amazing colors. Off the candid beach isolated reef formations nurture clouds of fish, live cowery shells (amazing how fast they actually get around), turtles and Nobina finds also two lobsters hiding in a hole. I manage to spear one for aperitif, taken on the bow while listening to the absence of human noises. The day after I must face it, and me and Andrew proceed to disassemble the heat exchanger, since I suspect it's pretty clogged and is what caused the overheating. The impeller is grinded to mush from our "way up" through the doldrums. After quite a sweat and few scratches I and Andrew get it out and take it apart. As I suspected years and years of broken impellers, melted zinc, stray algae and build up are making a mess of it all. During the day just about every corrosive product available on the boat has been run through the lines and it looks pretty clean at last. Another small sweat and the cooling flow is restored.

We spend four idyllic days stunned minute by minute the whole time by the absolute purity of everything around us, the overwhelming sense of remoteness. I walk around the island, noticing the many pits in the sand where turtles lay their eggs, mountains of shells, coconuts (almost) at arm's reach. It is a crime to leave, but time urges us on, and I really wanted to spend some quality time in Ifalik, want to get on one of those big canoes real bad!