It turned out Tuesday was to be Paul’s last day aboard. I’d promised him a ride up the mast and as I wanted to inspect my rigging and to untangle our shredded NZ courtesy flag we had an opportunity to kill a couple of proverbial birds. While I was up the mast I took a few pics of the area and Paul did the same. Soon, we’ll be posting pics again and we’ll include a few.
Next, Paul and I went ashore to do our various chores. I took an empty propane tank via Taxi to the Fiji Gas station out of town. It took a while for them to figure out how to fill our tank as their primary delivery device couldn’t fit past the plastic handles on our can. However, a means to cross fill from one of their other tanks and we were sorted. I took details of the taxi driver as we have a soon to be needed ride from Fawn Harbour to the east of us back into town.
Meeting up again with Paul we officially disembarked him from the boat and I paid our customs overtime fees. Paul was now officially, though not yet physically off the boat. Paul had sorted out his PADI course and had his books and DVDs to study. We went back to the boat to relax. At least Helen and I did. Paul got busy packing, cleaning his room then studying.
Just before 1pm I received a call from Albert from the Courts store in town who had a tech guy coming. He asked me to be at the Copra Shed in 10 minutes to sort out our internet connection as the tech guy was in town. I quickly packed my laptop and bit n pieces and was off. In the bar I met the Kilkeas who were also waiting for him. It turns out Albert had brought the tech guy over on his day off. Can’t imagine that ever happening at home. We soon had our USB stick working on the internet via the telecoms service. The main problem is that right now the data service is only GPRS which is incredibly slow. In a months time it should go 3G and we’ll see an immediate improvement. It’s incredibly painful using the internet at these speeds and everything takes time. But we’re rich in time right now so that’s less of an issue.
After testing the service by downloading my emails and a quick scan of the news (end of the world postponed and all that) I bought a chip off the guy there and then with the promise to do the official registration paperwork at the store today.
It was now time to take Paul ashore. I returned to the boat and dropped off my gear. Back ashore we walked with Paul to his hotel on the side of the hill as we wanted to explore a nearby path. From the hotel public balcony over the bay we had a great view of the anchorage. At this point Helen spotted something awry. Tahina was adrift and heading out of the channel. We could see folks going to the rescue. I was prepared to run down the hill and join in but it looked like I’d be too late to make a difference so instead I tried to contact Frank to let him know of the problem. It turns out he was in town trying to sort out his phone and had the chip out or something so he couldn’t be contacted. All was well in the end but apparently it was a close shave with a near miss on the reef. It was a fine example of the cruising community in action. We took some pictures from our vantage point which we’ll give to Frank and Karen later today.
After saying goodbye to Paul we set off to find the alleged path up to a viewpoint. We succeeded in wading through lots of long grass but didn’t get anywhere in particular so headed back into town.
Heading back to Dignity we ended up on Kilkea instead and were plied with G&Ts. By now the news of Tahina was spreading and was much the topic of discussion. We understood that the Borees were very much involved with the rescue. John and Pam from Passages soon joined us but eventually we had to tear ourselves away as we needed to shower then go ashore to eat.
Our plan for the evening was to eat at a nearby Chinese on our own. The Borees soon turned up with the same idea and we shared the table with them. The food turned out to be mediocre and the service lousy but the company great. Bert and Ingi persuaded us to come back to their boat for a while. We did not get back till very late.
Back on the boat we were tired but I could not resist catching up on some of our emails. We’d received a great message from Ben about his new job and wanted to reply to that. I’d also learned that our google ads account had been suspended due to inappropriate clicking. No details were provided and seeing as this happened on the day we arrived in Fiji it couldn’t have been anything we did as we were not connected. I filed an appeal.
In the mountain of email was some other rubbish crashing into our world which I need to sort out. It’ll get done but it was nice to be ignorant of all this for a while.
When we first arrived we were told by a few friends of a local salon who did a terrific massage for a very low cost. We’re both booked in on this for this morning. Looking forward to that.