The plan came together the way these plans usually do, which is to say it sat on the back of a chart for a week and then turned into a real plan in about ten minutes. We had been at anchor in Rikitea long enough to know everyone's dinghy by the sound of the outboard, and a window of clear weather and steady easterlies finally lined up with our friends on SV Serengeti being ready to move. Agakauitai is barely a passage at all from Mangareva, just a short hop across the lagoon, but a change of bay can do for a boat what a change of light does for a photograph. By late morning we were tied up to a fresh patch of water, looking at a different ridge and a different angle on the sun.

The first day Ted and I went up the ridge. The path is the kind that exists mostly because goats keep insisting on it, and at the top there is enough wind to make the drone sound brave. We came across a newborn kid on the way up, barely twice the size of a rabbit and standing on its legs the way you stand on a paddleboard for the first time, with all the right intentions and not much idea. The mother watched from a rock a few feet up and made it clear we could keep walking. From the top we watched SV Oso ghost past in the channel below, then dropped back down through the ti plants and the hibiscus to the dinghy. The lobsters, when we looked for them on the way home, had other ideas.

The second day was a long one in the slowest possible sense. Morning was for boat projects, afternoon was for a beach. Ted and his partner Mia joined me with a small cooler and a chair each, and we set up on a stretch of sand with no one else on it. We watched the world go by, which on Agakauitai meant black tip and white tip reef sharks running circles after bait fish at the edge of the reef, and none of it had anything to do with us. A hermit crab carried a hibiscus flower into a patch of light and held the pose long enough to be photographed, which is the kind of small generosity an island offers when it has decided to be friendly.

By the third morning the chart was pulling us back to Rikitea. The new shrouds had flown in from Tahiti and were waiting at the dock. Three trips up the mast got them on, more carefully each time. They are on now. The forecast is solid easterly, fifteen to twenty knots, and tomorrow we get to find out what the new wire thinks of all of this. Agakauitai keeps the photographs. The boat keeps moving.