A few more days of island bliss, exploring the ruins of the former leper colony, diving from the jetty with the kids (befriended through liberal distribution of lollipops), snorkelling over the giant clams bred in Makongai and it's time again to move on.We reach Koro island on January 8th, scratch the keel while dodging corals, but we're at last anchored off Naimbuna village.
We do the sevusevu and discover that the village has a pool of icy fresh water coming down from the mountain where to bathe and do laundry. The village pastor asks us a few liters of diesel for the village's generator as the supply ship is weeks late and they've run out. Instead of rationing the diesel they kept the lights on for most of the night (party on)...tomorrow is another day after all...
In exchange we get to drink kava with a gathering of village elders, and bathe at will in the crystal cool waters of the 'swimming pool'.
The hurricane season is not far off, and soon enough we set sail for Savusavu. Near the lagoon entrance we spot an 'uncharted island', which looks to me much like the tower of a submarine: askew antennas 'disguised' as trees, pine trees. Somebody should have told the guys that no tree grows at 45 degrees angle..perhaps palm trees?...but pine trees?
11 Jan. 2007
In Savusavu we pick a mooring from the Copra Shed and treat ourselves to lots of burghers, beer, internet all the while buying supplies and provisions. Discovered quite a bit of rot running around the cabin superstructure, we're filling it with bondo (don't know yet how to use epoxy properly). We find some really heavy green cotton cloth to make awnings of, and in town we find a skilled tailor/upholsterer who'll make an excellent inexpensive job (never ever enter a 'marine upholsterer', your wallet will be ripped clean off). Savusavu is a very nice microcosm, small scale but where everything is available.
We patronize the yacht club's bar, the burgher place with cute and smily waitresses but especially Tommo's japanese restaurant. Great guy, great stories and great food.
It's nice to find an all around tasteful place once in a while. If you go to Savusavu do not miss Tommo's restaurant. Japanese food on steroids.
29 Jan. '07
All rested and all the main repairs done, weather forecasts looking good (hah!), we finally are ready to depart for Tuvalu. All good sailing with serious magnetic disturbances around the Taveuni channel, five hundred miles to go.Just 200 miles from Tuvalu big wind and swell shift on the nose, it looks bad.
We heave to for 24 hours waiting to see what will happen. The bad weather isn't abating and sailing anywhere toward our destination impossible. The crew is moaning in a big way.
We decide together to turn back for Savusavu. After 2,5 days of running down monster waves, Keturah averaging 10 knots with peaks of 13 and the sea turned a white froth, 75 knots willies, me at the helm almost nonstop, we are in Fiji again. The day is very hazy&overcast the magnetic disturbance again confuses us all day long (we should be seeing land but we don't). At sunset C-map works just long enough to show us between two reefs way east of our estimated position, but it's enough to orient us toward Taveuni. We pass the channel at night, completely exhausted, and arrive in Savusavu the morning after. Calm waters again after that felt like heaven.
Although Savusavu is a reputed 'hurricane hole', when we arrive the place looks wrecked: pontoons ripped off their hinges, broken palm trees, boats in different stages of dishevelment.
06 Feb. '07
We are welcomed by Louis of trimaran A., who brings over some beers wondering 'what were you doing out there in this mess?', 'being pounded by a massive weather system, of course'. I'll later discover that the 'weather system' was fully acknowledged Tropical storm: TSP11. When we turned back little did we know that we'd be doing a rendez-vous with the thick of the weather just off the coast of Viti Levu. I will later also discover that we weren't the only ones caught unawares: once everyone left and I reached on my own Lautoka to do my bottom, at least another boat, who was anchored in the Mamanucas, blew three anchors and got washed on a reef where it sat and banged for three full days. And they had all the gear to receive forecasts (I don't, yet).
Once everyone gracefully helped out clearing the filthy mess accumulated during the storm, I remained alone (all had enough excitement for a while), left to sort out my fears of getting out there again, for the first time leaving by myself.
09 March '07
Departed for Lautoka, planning to go through Nausonisoni passage; once there heavy downpour and no visibility (one really has to take a lot in strides on boats!), so I take shelter in Navatu bay. Welcomed by the locals (Ace), I spend a few days there carrying construction material with the villagers up the hill, fishing, playing touch-rugby on the drying rubble tidal mudflat, bathing in the stream, and fitting in the village life. Me and Ace become really good friends, we have pasta on the boat a couple times. Everyone seems to smoke weed, they ask me if I have any, since the new harvest is far off and now they're out...I don't. I spend a few nights on Ace's verandah gobbling cup after cup of kava, all the while being urged on to tell more 'stories'. It seems cruiser's stories, of all kinds, is their only window on the wider world. Even the ones I find quite banal are received with ohhs and ahhs.
Ace offers me to remain in the village, the youths convened that I would be a nice addition to Navatu village: I'd get a home, fish for a living and they'd make sure I'd get a partner (from the 'other' village though!)...flattering and almost tempting, but I've got to go.
Heavy long passage, got to Vanua Levu by night, so impossible to get inside the reef, anchor and rest. I sleep a bit while drifting, waiting the morning to enter further on.
26 May '07
A couple weeks anchored in front of Bekana resort in Lautoka. Usual recognition rounds for hardware/paint/marine shops and then arrange to be hauled out in Vuda Point Marina where I arrive in a downpour (again!).
Once settled and equipped, I grind all paint off the hull, back to concrete (the fijian workers look at me like I'm a lunatic --but show thumbs up and smiles--, even they think it's a shit job to undertake). Two weeks with a 4,5 kilos 7' grinder working with arms streched upwards. A fijian helps me but he's quite sloppy, another fijian contractor (Henry) is supposed to be a fix-anything will take care of my keel scratch. Over a month goes by with highs and many lows, setbacks and uncertainty of what is actually really needed to fix concrete. 100 people with 100 different advices, conflicting websites and all. In the highs I make some lasagna dinner parties on Keturah while on the stands, in the lows I go to get comfort and friendliness with my neighbours wintering in Vuda. K., V. D., Josh and Nelly, Yves, Josef all people that brilliantly bore with my moaning, telling me how it's the same for everyone when on the dry. People never to be forgotten.
I watch the Hong Kong 7 on TV (Fiji won and it was fun being there with Fijians to celebrate), drink plenty beer at the bar to wear off the hours of grinding while covered in black chemical soot.
Relauch day. Boat is on the straps, I am so happy, everyone is so happy for me. Straps start pulling up. Keel repair crumbles to dust. Heart attack. Wrong concrete, wrong sand and basically wrong man for the job. Luckily I haven't paid him yet.
He walks out on me...very professional.
A couple days of deep, serious, devastating depresion.
Baobab Marine staps in. My situation is so outrageous, they offer to fix it up in no time at expense of materials only. More guardian angels. Maybe they just need the space, maybe they want to shame the dumb contractor or feel really sorry for my predicament, no matter. Brian and Willy, the owners who I've seen always overseeing the work actually get down to work themselves with Megapoxy and microspheres and lo!
In one week after they step in, I'm back in the water.
Meanwhile Sharon and Michael have joined in, we clean all up, buy food and a massive party on Keturah is up. Plenty booze, food, music, laughter, sea stories, pot. Uninvited people from other boats show up, all welcome, all partaking in the wonderful atmosphere. Delivery guys from SA coming across the Pacific, annoying 'Trumpeter' guy, great Yves, Neal & Hwey Ying, Drude and Josie and many others...
A week later everyone's departed for yet another weekend at Musket Cove. We scramble working our asses off, the itch resulting from many frustrating boatyard days makes me (and all) feverish to get out.
We are finally out for Musket. We arrive and Drude of V. D. and the others have setup another party to celebrate Keturah's return to cruising mode.
Just fantastic.Musket Cove is a lazy cruiser's heaven: comfy dinghy dock, a stocked supermarket with cheap meats and luxury imports, a bar with barbecues where wood and plates are provided, beer cheaper than Vunda, friends and all. We spend one day on V. D. at Tavarua break: a very famous surf break 'privatized' by a luxury surf camp. Even Drude, who is a pro and writes for a glossy surf magazine in the US has to 'beg' to surf the wave in between customers' shifts. It's crap to see waves as someone's private property...
Drude surfs on the opposite wave (not so good), while we look longingly at the easier breaks also part of the private wave.
Other nights we have dinners at the bar or on other boats. Sharon who is a professional acupuncture doctor and great masseuse overhauls my aching back from the boatyard work, while doing some sessions with resort customers and treating us to barbecue feasts with the income. Ole'!
5 June '07
We are back in Lautoka for some more shopping, a couple days and we set off again. This time we decide to stay away from people and costly comforts, so we head to Mamanutha-i-ra, one of the few islands NOT graced with a resort or a village.
There is no wind, we motor mostly and we reach it with the last light of the day. One attempt to get in the 'lagoon' enclosed by the islands and the reef does not go well,
I reverse in a hurry and so we decide to anchor outside and wait for tomorrow. The setting is stunning (see picture large).We move in the lagoon, anchor in perfect 20m, only boat there, and off we go discovering.
The island is deserted, with a sign that it's 'tabu' land and so not to be messed with. The white sand bar joining the big rock with the island is steep on the lagoon side, but on the opposite side it slopes off gently, all white sand, creating a calm pool of perfect-tropical-paradise turquoise water. Sharon and I spend some time enjoying the waters and the isolation.
We have a barbecue on the beach, then after a couple days of lazying, snorkelling and other pleasures we leave to return slowly toward Musket Cove.
7 June '07
We stop in a cove on NE side of Mamanutha-i-thake. Great snorkelling but the village is visited daily by tourists from nearby posh resorts, so, not looking like money, the welcome is barely polite and we get overcharged for Kava. The chief was even amused that we'd ask to do Sevusevu with him. Nice guy anyway. The day after we get back to Musket, then back again to Vunda.
There we finish fixing a water tank cover, put on some antiskid, more water, diesel, food, pick up Brian, leave Sharon. We do some more work on Keturah, I had it with Vunda's attitude. We befriend the guys from ketch 'Tequila', the only other boat with a crew under 40/60.
We decide to get to Beachcomber's while waiting for my new passport from Camberra. Beachcomber is a backpacker little picture perfect island...but the crowd is appalling. There is an actual group of down syndrome tourists, and the bad thing in it, was that it was very hard telling who didn't belong to it. The entertainments were also tuned to the general athmosphere of little-tropical-dysney-land-for-teenysh-backpackers.
Well, we decide to forget about them, and to enjoy the island none the less.
Me and Michael plan to treat ourselves to a very mediterranean-style day at the beach (towels, shades, books, cigarettes, wallets, papers).
We go at Musket once again but everyone's nearly gone or preparing to do so.
Back to Lautoka for the final touches. My passport isn't arriving though, I am overdue with my visa but immigration says it's ok. At last all pieces fit into place, we meet with boat 'Firenze' on the way West to Wilkes Passage, they're old timers and I hope their info on weather and landings is accurate, we'll try to stay close.
A few hours after exiting the last of Fiji's reefs, Firenze is lost in the horizon, while we sail along at a comfortable pace. The next day it all turns around and it will be hard sailing the whole trip. We in-fact arrive to Anatom (Aneytium) on a metereologically ominous day. The island is steep and volcanic, with violent breakers all around and especially on Intao reef marking the entrance to Anelghowhat bay. The nature and setting look straight out of Jurassic Park, with multiple rainbows on all sides.
We drop anchor but 'Firenze' is missing.
1 July '07
We arrive in Port Vila. There was no check-in in Anatom, we feigned some repairs and real exhaustion and were given enough time for clean-up, fix-up (hand-stitching sails like a maniac) and rest.
Then off to Vila, but not getting there before having steering cable burst, failing to rise customs on the radio in Tanna and being hit by a westerly with dramatic thundestorm (while rounding "Satan's Point"). Motored by night into rolly anchorage on NE Erromango for rest.
Finally in Port Vila, informal formalities (quarantine only showed up a week later...), showers etc.
I see Firenze here, who'll help out restore my steering in exchange for some sail tape.
Everything is expensive as in Europe.
Michael and Brian leave (one for college, the other for who knows).
13 July '07
Tanna: discovered diesel full of muck on the way there, engine stopped and then sailed to Port Resolution where I was towed in the anchorage by other cruisers. Built a filtration system through which I ran all my fuel, decanting it in plastic bottles, then after the immense job, passed a kidney stone, took some 'custom' medicines. Made friends and drank Kava with chief Philamon, listening to the forest's kava sounds...long after all the "tourists" were gone. Walked in the bush, bathed in the hotsprings pouring out of Yasur volcano; visited remote village on the plains. Asked 'when will the second coming be?'
Hummmmm.....never?
Mistook for vanuatuan TWICE by neighboring cruisers (no, I'm not from this village, I'm from the yacht next to yours).
My gift to the chief: chocolate and a long talk of what's going on in the world. The american's gift to the chief: an american flag. Chocolate was appreciated, they were sent out with the tourist lot.
Can you spot me?