Commodore
May 31, 2025

Sunday 1 June – Jane and Mike join us onboard

The morning started with a lot of activity, Rowan was getting our early cup of tea when he heard a PanPan distress message on the vhf. An Australian catamaran arriving from New Caledonia had lost its engines and was asking for help and getting no response from the Port Vila harbour master. Rowan responded and said he would get 4 dinghies to go out and meet them. Alia Vita, Rala and Aldabra all joined Rowan going out to find the cat. I stayed on board getting the cabin ready for our guests. It was an old cat with 3 men on board, they soon had it towed to the anchorage. There was a little upset when JeldiJeldi didn’t get out the way of the one hull and was nearly sunk! But besides that and leaving a few smears of green paint on the dinghy the cat was brought to safety. Rowan invited Alia Vita and Rala back to the boat for breakfast, where we had our normal fry up….making a good inroad into our 60 eggs we brought from NZ!

At 10:30 am Rowan was at the dinghy dock to pick up our friends Jane and Mike. It was great to catch up with them, we saw Jane a few years ago in London, but before that we last saw them in 2013 in Adelaide where they live, and one other time since we left South Africa in 1987. Plenty to catch up on. We dropped our mooring lines and headed clockwise up Vanuatu island. We had a lovely sail for a few hours and then tried anchoring between two islands in an area that was marked as sand. It was not to be, the anchor dragged and when Rowan swam over the anchor he could see it was dragging over hard coral. The tide was also ripping between the islands, so it was quite bouncy. We picked up and headed further north and found a lovely sheltered bay, off Moso Island, we anchored quite far out, and hooked into sand.

We introduced the Greenings to a boat BBQ and enjoyed a good sunset, with loads of reminiscing to catch up on.