Commodore
August 6, 2024

Wednesday 7 August – heading to the main island

We decided to head to the main island today, to get my ear checked out. We had been planning to go tomorrow, to take Phil and Wendy back to catch their flight, so we are leaving a day earlier than planned. My ear is still completely blocked although nothing like the initial pain and throbbing, I finished two weeks of antibiotics a few days ago and in desperation I have started another lot of Amoxicillin that Wendy had and was not using.

We got sorted in the morning putting all the inflatables away and prepared for our overnight passage, which included baking some crunchies (South African cookies) to sustain us through the night shift. Just after lunch we headed for the northern pass as Rowan had found a place for us to anchor PolePole and the three of them planned to snorkel the pass which is meant to be excellent. It should have been slack tide but when we got there the water was looking pretty choppy with quite a bit of wind. The plan was abandoned and we started heading to the marina Vuda (pronounced Vunda) near the town called Nadi (pronounced Nandi) – a lot of the local words have an N in the pronunciation which is missing in the spelling, Kadavu is pronounced Kandavu.

The sea was really churned up from the winds, poor Wendy was pretty seasick. Our route seemed to be hitting the waves side on and was not pleasant at all. We altered our course to go between two islands to seek a bit of shelter from the mainland, which produced a much more comfortable passage. I did the first shift, navigating between the two islands, where the wind swirled from all directions which caused a bit of dramatic noise with the rigging, but once through, it all calmed down. Poor Wendy had to sleep upstairs which has much more airflow and so much quieter, as you don’t hear the bashing of the waves on the hulls quite so much.

We went way too fast, we cannot get into the marina in the dark. We arrived at the pass into the area we were going at around 4am, Phil and Rowan navigated their way through, apparently it was all really well lit and well marked. It is the main way in to a big port, so it has quite a bit of big traffic. Rowan found a huge bay with an easy anchorage just inside the pass. The men got the anchor down and we all collapsed into bed for a couple of hours of much needed sleep. I had to get up again at about 5am to turn off the vhf radio as some very noisy Indian port officials were having long heated discussions with various boats. I went straight back to sleep, it was blissful to be in calm waters.