Commodore
June 30, 2024

Monday 1 July – Itching to get going

We woke up early to get ready to depart today. We are heading to the Lau Group of islands which means sailing directly into the trade Winds, so we need to find a good weather window when the winds change direction a bit, to make it a more comfortable ride. Meanwhile we will do a few little hops to get us closer. The plan is to just go to the tip of the headland today, to the Cousteau Resort. But first we had to wait for our SD Navigation card.

To show you where we are and that we are heading to the Lau group, the islands are so small they barely show up

Today we motored to the point, and tomorrow we head to Taveuni

We headed in to town promptly, I needed to do some last minute provisioning, as the Lau islands are off the beaten track and have no real shops. I also queued for ages at the bank getting smaller denominations of our cash, the ATM only spews out $100 FJD bills which is about £35. Met Rowan at the market who had been to the chandlery and the card had not arrived yet, he was told to go back after 11am! This meant cancelling our booking at the fuel dock. Finally at 11am Rowan rushed off and the card was there, got back to the boat and it would still not download. Oh how blue the air was! Rowan has all the charts on his phone but I was very reluctant to depart without them on the boat chart plotter, especially as the Lau Islands are one long complicated reef to navigate. Rowan tried all sorts of things, he borrowed a card reader from the boat next door and still had no luck. Thank goodness for Stinky and google, as somewhere in all the online chat he discovered you have to tell the system you have a new card or it always searches for the old one. Hallelujah he got it working, and our card reader was working too, we had thought we might have broken it.

By then it was mid afternoon, we rescheduled the fuel, everyone watching us depart in a good gusty wind, but it all went smoothly with the sweetest, friendliest guys hand pumping nearly 400Litres of fuel, from 3 big barrels. They had a dipstick that they put some paint on in front of us, to check for water in the diesel, the paint turns red if it contacts water. All 3 barrels the paint remained unchanged, his final little flourish was he put the dipstick under the water tap and it turned red. The whole performance was like a magician’s trick, he was so pleased with himself, it was a great tension reliever after the last stressful couple of hours!

Fully loaded we headed out the marina and left Savusavu behind. We have thoroughly enjoyed staying here and it will be even better next year when the building works is completed. They are the fanciest marina loos/showers we have ever been to. Huge big cubicles with each one open to a little garden, making them so airy, not the usual tired, dank smelling marina ablutions.

Our wonderful marina toilets

So happy to be back at sea!

We literally motored for about half an hour and anchored outside the Cousteau Resort, always a bit nerve racking using things for the fist time after a break. Our newly re-galvanised anchor chain is much more coarse and not as slippery as the old version, making it much more difficult for me to knock into the anchor locker if it gets jammed. Sadly Yachties are not welcome at this resort, it looked very smart and had expensive looking houses nearby, definitely a smarter part of the island. We had a delicious salad on board and headed to bed early, as we need to get going early for tomorrow’s passage.