The alarm went off at 5:45am, 45 minutes before sunrise. It was dark, overcast and spotting with rain. The recent ‘cold’ snap had not moved on. We’d both had a patchy nights sleep but keen to reach Suva before sunset or, better still, 4pm when the customs office closed, we got up and got ready. It didn’t take long before we were lifting the anchor in predawn twilight.
We followed our tracks out of the bay we were in and headed for the pass. We raised the main in the lee of the land. Even so the wind was already in the teens. We jibed through the pass just as the GPS beeped dawn unfurling the headsail as we turned for Suva.
Soon we were flying along at around 9 knots in the calm waters in the lee of the outlying reef. The main was already reefed from the night before and running down wind in just over 20 knots of apparent wind we were close to having to reef the headsail too. Before long we were into the unprotected ocean in 3m swells. Unfortunately, the swell was approaching from the SSW and not from the SE which would have been much more comfortable. This felt like passage making as normally we avoid the big seas when doing inter-island hops like this. In these big seas our speed dropped a little but not by much. We were still averaging over 8 knots. It was bumpy but wild.
We reached the main island of Vitu Levu far earlier than planned. I was able to grab a vodafone signal and download the weather forecasts that I couldn’t get earlier via the SSB (too early for propagation). The marine forecast was now calling for ‘very rough seas’. We had ’em. The rough seas caused us to debate my earlier plot of an early entrance behind the reef. We decided against going into the pass just west of the Nukulau Islet, 7nm east of the main port entrance. The promise of calm seas behind the reef were overridden by the unknown complications of a possible following sea into the tight turn at the pass followed by sailing in strong winds in a constrained channel. We stayed out for another hour sailing at the angle the boat felt comfortable.
As we frequently do we jibed a little early requiring us to go wing on wing to find the right angle to sail into Suva on a reach. For the short period of time necessary we managed to put in the concentration to make this work in those rough seas. As the gap between the reefs narrowed the waters calmed and we shot into Suva harbour sailing to within half a mile of our intended anchorage before dropping the sails. By 1pm we were on the hook. 55nm in under 7 hours, including all the sail raises / drops & anchoring. Our fastest ever passage.
Now this may sound like we were beaten up badly. In fact, apart from Helen feeling a bit off colour early on, this was a fantastic ride. The swell did gradually clock round to be more in line with the wind. There may have been a time when seas like this would have scared the pants of us. But this one was totally manageable. We always had an easy entrance into Suva as an option so there really was nothing worrying about the passage.
Within an hour of arrival we were ashore to do our formalities and explore Suva. We first visited the Royal Suva Yacht Club office to declare our arrival before walking to the customs office at the wharf south of us. Once we’d cleared in we spent 2-3 hours wandering around town. There were a large number of supermarkets which, to Helen’s delight we visited most and to my delight we didn’t visit all.
We eventually ended up looking for somewhere to eat. I fancied somewhere a little more western. Avoid the temptation of MacDonald’s we ended up at the Bad Dog Cafe enjoying a decent meal and drinks for not a lot of $$$$.
After dinner we trekked back to the nearest, and one of the best, supermarkets and picked up a few essentials before picking up a suspensionless taxi back to the yacht club. There we bumped into Bill and Cathy from Jarana and stayed for a while sharing pitchers of beer and catching up. They’re stuck here waiting for a weather window to get down to the Astrolabe reef. This is our planned first stop when our friends arrive next week. We’ll need a plan B for this sort of weather as we’ll have limited time and won’t want to hang around here for too long.
That being said we’re now down to weather watching hoping for a near term improvement over the gray days we’ve been recently having and in the medium term some favourable weather for getting south. The skies this morning are certainly brighter and the 5 day forecast shows a period of low wind days early next week. Motoring all the way south is definitely an option we’d go for.