Which makes an attempted landing at the actual airstrip more reasonable than flying it into the ocean.
Possibly, but the actual inbound tracks (for the 11/29 VORs, at least) go nowhere near the runway itself. Given terrain, it is questionable whether a forced land landing would have been more successful than what happened. Now the VOR 04 (VOR at threshold) and slide off the runway at low speed? A possibility.
DBTW, I was a bit tongue-in-cheek about about descending orbits until Visual. However, your theory:
it seems much more likely that in the end he was over water looking for a cloud break and quite simply found himself in the water.
just doesn't stack up. The report clearly states what happened in the few minutes prior to alighting. If the report is correct the crew knew exactly when they were going to touchdown.