While I had the point of the story correct, it seems some of the details weren’t. So in the interest of accuracy, here is what I now understand to be true.
It was not a young couple but an older English gentleman who is retired and took up the cruising lifestyle a few years back. He was accompanied by a companion or significant other, but is not married. He was approaching the reef entrance to Suva and, from what I am told had no charts, but did have the reef clearly in sight. He dozed off and you know the rest.
He was taken in by folks at the yacht club – principally Vincent and his wife who own the Sails Restaurant at the Royal Suva Yacht Club – so the hospitality part of the story stands as written.
In these parts, a fellow nicknamed Peter the German is the local salvage expert, but he is off on a delivery in the Solomons. In his absence, Vincent helped the poor owner to organize a salvage effort and the boat was successfully pulled from the reef on Monday by floating it free with air bags.
The airbags were leaking, however, and they were barely able to get the boat back to the yacht club (water was up to the gunnels). There it was allowed to sink a second time and now they are working on getting it out of the water and to a yard for repairs.