November 21, 2023
Ground hog day, up at 4:00am and another 60ish nautical miles to cover. With the sunrise, again, out came the main (reef 2, 23 knots of wind) and jib. Soon we were cruising along in the upper 6 to low 7 knot range. Perfect! We managed to sail about 3/5th of the way before, as forecast, the wind dropped and…
November 20, 2023
With 60nm to go and a new anchorage to visit, we wanted to ensure we arrived early to have good sunlight, this meant a 4:00am departure. The night before, not thinking I had kept myself up past 9:00pm, totally unnecessary but thankfully I still had a good sleep and woke up refreshed. We slipped the mooring ball lines and we…
November 19, 2023
The point of today was to dive The Chimneys, we woke to 15 knots of wind and rolly seas, that would have been fine but it was the cloud cover that had us worried. We bided our time and around 10am patches of blue sky were visible, we ended up waiting until 12:30 to get the best sun angle and…
November 18, 2023
No doubt about it, today was a day in the water. We started early going out to the reef, a few miles from the anchorage, and scouted out a smaller pass that we hoped to use when we depart in a few days. With the dinghy we could easily make out the route and with a phone a track was…
November 17, 2023
We weren’t in a rush but around 6:30am we slipped off the mooring ball and started our motor over to Namena. A premier diving spot with 21 marked driving locations around the reef. Fingers were crossed for some amazing free diving, but first we had to get there. The sea state and winds were very calm and it was a…
November 16, 2023
Going into it we realized this was a heavy lifting work day. It started with the water taxi to hit the ATM, the bread store, and New Market. Oh and also the Town market for the first batch of the fresh produce and then the fancy wine and food shop for pickles and bacon. And I forgot to mention the…
November 15, 2023
Cyclone Mal passed Fiji overnight bringing damaging winds (90 knots) to Somosomo (where we visited at the beginning of this sailing adventure). We came into the Nawi marina just in case the cyclone shifted more east but thankfully all we had was some rain at 2:22am, some wind around 3:30am (maximum 20 knots, maybe gust to 25 knots) Throughout the…
November 14, 2023
Not my best night’s sleep and so waking at 3:00am I knew my chances of falling back asleep were not good. Soon enough 4:00am rolled around and it was time to get moving. Off the mooring ball and heading towards Savusavu in no time, with barely any wind this would be a motor day. With a rather large swell, at…
November 13, 2023
We have been watching an area that was looking to form into a cyclone for three days and had a bit of a scare a few days ago. We normally review the European, American, and Spire weather models but wanting to check all the boxes that day we added the PWE and PWG (Predict Wind modified models). That first check,…
November 12, 2023
Last night was not a good sleeping night, Blerg. The anchor chain got wrapped around the float (we had on it to prevent dragging on coral below us), which meant lot of noise and banging. I actually woke up thinking our bridle had broken, so I surprised that it was only the float issue. We decided to make a change…
November 11, 2023
Where we are anchored on in a cove of a private island with a coconut farm on one side and a fancy five-star resort on the other side. The cove is on the backside and has a little bure (cabana) that resort guests rent as a private beach experience. They drop them off with a long boat and guests get…
November 10, 2023
Big winds were forecast so we wanted to get moving to prevent getting pinned down for a few days. The plan was up at 4:00am for the 50-ish mile passage to Matagi Island (a small horseshoe shaped island with a fancy resort (opposite side of the anchorage)). Like clockwork, both Carl and I popped out of bed and jumped right…