We pulled the anchor at Rikitea and worked our way west through the lagoon. The Gambier interior is a long obstacle course of pearl farms, black pearl operations marked by surface buoys and lines that do not always show up on the chart. We picked our way slowly, eyes on the water, and dropped the hook in Baie Onemea by mid-afternoon. The anchorage sits below a tall rock outcrop on the lee side of Taravai, calm enough that the surface barely moves.

That evening I went ashore to a long desert beach below the rocks, strung the hammock between two pandanus, and watched the light on the water until it ran out. The horizon was clean. No cloud, no haze. As the last sliver of sun went under, the whole top of it flared green for about a second. The green flash is a real thing, not a sailor's myth: a thin band of refracted blue-green light that appears for an instant when conditions are right, a clean horizon and very still air. I had been watching for one for years. Then the moon came up full and bright enough to read by, and I stayed out late with the camera, trying to catch the silver path it was throwing across the water.

A few days later we shifted around to False Pass, a small bay tucked between two hills with SV Serengeti and a couple of other boats already in. The pass itself runs the tidal current in and out of the lagoon, fast water on the change. Serengeti's crew and I dropped a dinghy and dove the pass on the flood, drifting in with the warm rush of new water as the atoll started to fill. The visibility was the kind where you can see the bottom thirty feet down without trying. No lobster, but a parade of fish that did not seem to care we were there.

We will stay a few more days, then start working back toward Rikitea for fuel and provisions.