July 21st Aitutaki

Busy times yesterday - 4 new boats arrived, 3 uneventful, but the 4th made up for that.
We heard a distressed voice on the radio; a boat with engine failure was trying to sail into the anchorage on the ebb tide and against the wind???!!! So we thought that was a novel approach. Before long he was in serious difficulty. We zoomed over in the dinghy as he was sideways in the narrow pass (he was inches off the reef) so we nudged him around so his bow was facing out; the tide and wind pushed him out again.
He then decided to wait for slack low tide, thankfully he has a shallow draft of 4 ft. We tied our dinghy and our neighbour's dinghy on each side of his boat so we were the power and he steered. All went well - we got him right in the anchorage.
Prior to all this we had decided to have a little party, so now we had 4 more boats to invite so we had a record breaking 17 people on board.
Today we are all hunkered down as a squally front passes over us; its cloudy and rainy and there are 2 more boats waiting to come in. This may prove tricky as its quite important to have good sunlight to see through the water so you can avoid the reefs and coral heads.
We've heard from a couple of boats who are at sea, one is having gusts up to 40 knots so fingers crossed it doesn't get worse for him. The South Pacific convergence zone is causing all the mischief, it has intensified the front.