Aboard Dignity (Lagoon 420) Blog

Category: Fiji

  • Weather Bulletin

    Now that we’re here we take the detail a little more personally.

    Issued from the National Weather Forecasting Centre Nadi at 5:30am on Sunday the 29th of May 2011

Forecast to midnight tonight for the Fiji group:
Fine apart from few showers over the interior and eastern parts of larger islands and eastern
parts of the group. Elsewhere, fine apart from afternoon or evening showers. Possible
thunderstorms over the interior and western parts of larger islands in the afternoon or evening.
Cool at night.
Moderate easterly winds.
Moderate seas.
Outlook for MONDAY : Some showers about the interior and eastern parts of the larger islands
and eastern parts of the group.
Elsewhere, fine. Cool at night.

For Savusavu : Cloudy periods with few showers.  Cool at night.
Outlook for MONDAY : Some showers.

    Okay, okay, okay. I get it. It’ll rain from time to time.

  • Lesiatheva Point

    We had quite a busy morning collecting tanks, provisioning, refueling the dinghy and sorting out taxis for next Wednesday when we’re expecting friends to visit. By 11am we were done and ready to leave Savusavu. As much fun as it’s been we need a break. Our main goal is to get to Fawn Harbour early next week but that’s too far to reach with good light starting at Savusavu in the middle of the day. So we ambitiously set off for Lesiatheva Point just 4nm away where we knew there would be an anchorage and possibly free internet. We found both.

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    We’re actually anchored off the Jean-Michel Cousteau Fiji Islands Resort which looks pretty cool but out of our price bracket. It makes a very nice back drop to our location.

    Once we’d settled in we went snorkeling nearby. It was not spectacular but it was great to get wet again. The last time we were in the sea was way back in Kelefesia last October. The water was warm and there was coral and fish to see but it was a little murky. After our swim we took the kayak out together for the first time and paddled around the edge of the resort. The exercise was good and we can see ourselves doing this more often.

    After that it was a matter of just relaxing the afternoon and evening away. We had pretty decent weather through the afternoon even though it looked like the heavens were pouring on Savusavu just a short distance away. Helen cooked up a great curry which we were going to eat outside except the rain finally caught us so we sat inside. We also took in a movie.

    We’ve decided to hang around here one more day. We do have internet which is good some of the time. Mainly we just want time to really decompress after our passage and the business of Savusavu. Tomorrow morning we’ll leave at dawn for Fawn Harbour aiming to arrive early afternoon when the light is good for our passage through the reef.

    Speaking of passages through reefs we heard some terrible new from our friend Peter on Troutbridge. He ran up onto a reef while entering Suva. Best to read his blog for the detail. Boating dreams sometimes come to a rapid and shocking end/hiatus and we feel for Peter. He came up through the same mess of sea and weather as we did. However, Dignity is a solid boat and carries us safely through such extremes even if not comfortably when the going is rough.

  • Getting ready to go …

    Having decided to leave Savusavu over the weekend we ramped up our efforts to ready ourselves for the coast/islands. First, I went ashore to find out about getting our dive tanks filled and the exact process for filing our cruising plans. The dive shop at the nearby marina was unmanned so I went to customs running into Paul who was waiting for his next dive lesson/trip. In the end I sorted out fills from his dive instructor. For the permit I discovered we had a maximum 24 hours to get out of the creek after filing which we could only do on a weekday. That made a Sunday departure out of the question. So we’ll be leaving Saturday around noon.

    Much of the rest of the day was spent form filling and internet shopping for bits an pieces for our friends to possibly bring from the US in a month or two.

    We spent the evening ashore at the Copra Shed marina where they had their weekly fundraising barbecue for the kids sailing team. A couple of the young girls performed some Fijian dancing. This was much more like the dancing we’ve seen before and the two of them had more teeth between them than the last lot.

  • Bazaar

    After a bit of a lie in my first chore was to top up the starboard diesel tank. I emptied three jerry cans in then dinghied off to fill five leaving them on the deck to complete the fill later in the day. We’d heard from the Kilkeas that there was a bazaar in town with local dancing. We could see something had been set up ashore from the boat so we headed off to town with the Kilkeas to see what was up.

    It turned out there was a fund raiser for a women’s community hall. Arts and crafts from villages around the island were on display and for sale. We were considered invited guests and given a shaded place to sit together. Frank from Tahina showed up as did the Dreamtimes and Stray Kitties. After some speeches we were taken to see the local craft work before sitting down again for a hot drink, cakes and to watch the dancing.

    As we’ve crossed the Pacific the dancing has always very interesting, in particular how it has changed from region to region. Invariably the dancing is performed by young ladies and men. The male dancing is always warlike and the female dancing expressive and alluring. East of Tonga the dancing always involved a lot of vigourous bottom wiggling. In Tonga and NZ the female dancing was less vigorous and more nuanced. Today we were treated to toothless old ladies dancing randomly on their feet and a little more organized sitting down on a mat. However, they were hilarious at times making gestures that made the local crowd roar with infectious laughter and us in turn. The troup of senior citizens danced through intermittent rain and ended up inviting a few of us to dance with them.

    Then the heavens opened big time turning the field into a pond. We sat through the deluge under our shelter. Once the skies cleared we went to the market to pick up some curios and some kava for future sevusevu ceremonies before heading back to the boat.

    We relaxed for much of the afternoon. I spent a little while researching alternate advertising possibilities for the website and have kicked off a couple of new applications. For my regular readers here is my request. If you see ads reappear on the site, please only click on them if you have genuine interest in the product or service being advertised. The ad services are ultra sensitive to behaviors that may be construed as attempts to generate false revenue so clicking on ads to give us beer money will ultimately have the opposite effect. The good news is I’ve learned a little more about all this which can only be a good thing. Later in the afternoon I emptied another couple of gerry cans into the main tank before refilling those two and storing all the filled containers away.

    In the evening we joined the Tahinas aboard Stray Kitty for grilled Mahi Mahi which they’d caught on the way in. We ended up staying quite late.

    We’re beginning to feel very much partied out and are looking forward to taking a break from Savusavu. We’re looking at a Sunday departure so we’ll sort out our coastal clearance today.

  • Changing Fuel Pumps

    Before going ashore we wanted to do a wash so with a good amount of time to spare we fired up the generator to kick things off. It stopped fairly quickly giving an error code of ‘Unknown’. This usually means it’s time to check the fuel filter. There was no water in the primary filter so I removed it. It looked a little dirty so I replaced it with a new one but the generator still would not start. I then wondered if it was the fuel pump so I dug out the spare and changed it. This wasn’t so easy as the spare had a different arrangement of input/output directions and would not fit in the box in which the original was housed. Replacing the pump therefore meant removing the box and rearranging the fuel lines. The genset still didn’t work. I rechecked the filter and realized I’d messed up the gasket which was allowing air in and hence no fuel was being drawn through. I sorted this out and all was ok. So the obvious conclusion was Steve error on the filter change.

    By now there was not enough time to do the wash before we were due out. I cleaned all the diesel off me and then we headed ashore for our massages. Helen went first. While she had hers I sorted out the registration for our new data SIM. After Helen’s hour I had mine. It was heavenly. We showered back at the marina before returning to the boat to relax following our massage.

    After lunch I went back to the mess I’d left from the morning. The obvious thing to do was to put the old pump back in. The meant reinstalling the box and rerunning the fuel lines back into it. I completed the work, tidied up and performed a check on the generator. It didn’t work. Argggghhhhh. So it must have been the pump all along and I’d created an additional problem when I’d switched the filter. Nothing for it but to switch out the fuel pump one more time. Once done all was ok again.

    I’d had enough work for the day. I had planned to tip the diesel in our jerry cans into the main fuel tanks but by now it was raining and I was tired so I retired for the day. I’d been upload our photos while all this was going on so at least this was finished and I was able to post them to our blog.

    I thought my efforts were now done. Turned out Helen had created some more work for me. In an effort to clear up space on her netbook she’d deleted the wireless network drivers. As the wireless network was the only connection this presented a bit of a problem. I did manage to resolve it but it took a long time. In the middle of all this we popped out for dinner which we managed to have on our own. We saw Paul heading off for his own dinner. He’s progressing well on his dive course. On the way back we bumped into that evenings crowd at the Copra Shed and met for one beer before they all headed off for dinner.

    We finished the evening watching a movie while I finished fixing Helen’s PC.

    This morning I’ve learned my google adsense appeal has been rejected. The implication is that someone has been clicking a lot of our ads breaking their policy. The appeal is final and for life. Perhaps sometime when I’m bothered to do so I’ll look into alternatives but for now the ads have gone and our vast revenue stream shut down.