Plumbing success

A trawl around the hardware stores in Savusavu told us that the 'push-fit' plumbing fittings on board Maunie are not used in this part of the world so we were pondering the options of how to fix our leaking water system. We looked at suppliers' websites in New Zealand and whether we could possibly ask a yacht still in Opua to bring parts up with them but were concerned as to whether we'd manage to order the right bits.

Anyway, a chance conversation with Colin on Ithaka yielded a wonderful result yesterday. "I've got a bag of various plumbing fittings" he said, "Probably nothing to fit your system but you are welcome to have a look.". Well, he had a 'Tee' and a 'Straight' connector of the right type, we had a length of the 15mm plastic pipe and, after a bit of a tussle, we now have a restored, leak-free water system again! Celebrated with cold showers yesterday afternoon. Lovely. 

Photos from the passage

Dawn in the Savusavu anhorage. The yellow catamaran is our friends Sel Citron

We've had a busy couple of days since arriving in Fiji. Once again we've found that coming back to a previously-visited port makes things so much easier so we sorted the paperwork, got our internet and found some cold beers very quickly. It was great to see friends here, particularly when we saw Tom, Colin and Damian who were having a busy day transferring diesel in jerrycans to refuel their boats - they were hugely kind and delivered 100 litres to us too, saving us a lot of hassle. We celebrated that evening with good food and drink so slept very well!

The following morning we managed a team effort to take about a dozen gas bottles from 6 boats to be refilled so apart from effecting a repair to our water system (today's task) and solving an air leak on the dinghy (ditto) we feel we're doing pretty well. It's great to be back here.

Here are a few photos from the passage:

"Chafe is your enemy" - damaged spinnaker guy caused by the rope chafing in the end fitting of the pole on the first night 

Anti-chafe solution - a snatch block on a dyneema (tough rope) loop allows the rope to move a little without damage

A circling Albatross

A less-successful flight - a stranded flying fish

A Good Cloud, delivering rain (which missed us) and some wind

Evening light, with a crescent moon just visible at the top of the photo

We plan to be here a couple more days - we're waiting for our cruising permit which should arrive on Monday, we hope - so we'll visit the brilliant vegetable market this morning to stock up on greens.

Finally we received some wonderful news from home this morning - we are Great Aunt and Great Uncle once again with the arrival of Erin Florence to Di's nephew Paul and his wife Kaylie. Congratulations to them both!

Safely arrived in Savusavu

We had a great night's sailing up through the islands and arrived here at 10.15 local time. We're tied up at the Quarantine dock waiting for the officials to come and clear us in. Lovely to be still after a few slightly bouncy days at sea!

 

More to follow in the next day or two once we've got internet access via Vodafone.

 

 

Trundling northwards

We're 30 hours into the passage and making nice, steady progress towards Fiji. The wind is dead behind us so, apart from some rolling in the waves, it's pretty effortless sailing – just trundling along. We debated long and hard about putting the spinnaker up this morning but the forecast for tomorrow is for more wind so going faster today wouldn't benefit us in the long term and it stayed in its bag; at the moment the chart plotter is calculating our arrival at about 04.00 on Thursday so we'll need to slow down a bit if anything.

 

The route between here and Savuavu has a number of reefs and islands, often not marked with lights, that we'll be passing during tomorrow night. We've chosen a route to leave the island of Gau to starboard with then a dog-leg right and left up to Savusavu, leaving Koro Island to starboard. There's often a bit of a 'squash zone' between the two big islands, Viti Levu and Vanua Levu so our night watches will be a bit busier than the have been recently, particularly with fishing boats and cargo ships to look out for too. As usual we are updating http://www.yit.co.nz/yacht/maunieofardwall every day at around 1900 UTC and we'll probably add a couple of extra reports as we go through the islands so you can follow our course.

 

 

About to resume the journey

After a very relaxing weekend's break in the North Minerva Resort, with 17 other boats, we are about to set sail again – as soon as the bread rolls come out of the oven.

 

The time here allowed us to recharge batteries (ours and Maunie's) and we've eaten well and banked some good sleep. Di has baked some moral-boosting choc chop cookies (thanks for the recipe, Clare Murtagh!) so we're good to go. The passage ahead is still 420 miles, so just under 3 days; we always underestimate the length of this voyage from NZ to Fiji and have to remind ourselves that it's the equivalent of about two fifths of an Atlantic Crossing and probably more testing in terms of weather systems.

 

Talking of the weather, it did exactly what was promised last night – at about midnight the weather front crossed over us, bringing rain, squally winds and a very quick change in direction from NE to SW. So we should have good 18-20 knot following winds to push us up to Savusavu – we aim to arrive there early on Thursday morning local time. Our route takes us past some small islands and reefs in the Koro Sea so there will be some careful navigation; at least the moon will be bigger to help us at night.

 

Once again the SSB radio has been well used in the past couple of days. Yesterday a boat called Pacific Cool, en route to Vanuatu, called up to say that they'd hit a big wave and the skipper had fallen and injured his back so they were diverting to New Caledonia, about 2 days' sail away. They didn't know anything about medical facilities at New Cal so, on their behalf, Graham called up Taupo Maritime Radio in NZ who were super-helpful. They gave us details of email addresses and phone numbers for the coastguard centre in New Cal. and also passed on the information to them so that Pacific Cool would be on their watch list. On this morning's radio Net we were able to pass on all this to the boat so that, when they arrive, they should have a reception committee as well as medical advice over the satellite phone. New Cal is a French-governed island so facilities there are very good, apparently – there's even a Carrefour!

 

We'll the timer has just beeped for the bread rolls and they are looking delicious, so we'd better get on with some sailing!

Safely anchored in North Minerva Reef

Our timing was impeccable. We arrived at the reef at 10.00am just as the wind swung around to the North East and we've anchored in lovely clear water so we could see the anchor hit the sandy bottom 12m below us. When we arrived there were already 8 boats here and a further 4 have since pulled in with yet more on their way.

 

The screen-shot from our plotter shows you the reef as Maunie approached the entrance on the north-west side – you can see a couple of grey triangles inside the reef which are the AIS signals of two anchored boats. What the picture doesn't convey is that, because we arrived at high tide, much of the reef was submerged or just awash so its extremities were only marked by the breaking surf from the ocean swell; it was impossible to take a photo to convey this.

 

Inside the lagoon the boats are bobbing about gently to a little wind-driven chop but as the tide recedes the reef will give us more protection. The sun is shining and the water's invitingly warm so a swim, a siesta, a beer and some lunch are next on the agenda. Not sure about the order of these yet.

Approaching Minerva Reef

Finally, finally, after 37 hours of motoring, we found some wind last night and thankfully switched off the engine at 17.20. We had some very pleasant sailing through the night but at 05.50 this morning the wind gave up and the engine's now back on. However we are only about 4 hours from Minerva Reef and we're hoping the wind will return to allow us to sail the last bit. We overtook two smaller boats, Trumpeter and Donella, in the night; it was a typically small-world moment as Donella's crew Darrel and Sonia bought our old mainsail stackpack cover from us in Opua when we got our new one and, after some tlc with the sewing machine are very pleased with it.

 

The slight tedium of motoring yesterday was enlivened, but not in a good way, by a discovery of a water leak in one of the connectors in our pressurised fresh water circuit. The first we knew of it was one of us happening to see water pumping out from our automatic bilge pump and we reckon about 200 litres of precious fresh water was lost; at least the bilges got a rinse. We shut down the pressure pump and can access water via two hand pumps in the galley and forward heads sinks but when we get into the anchorage we'll try to effect a temporary repair with self-sealing rubber tape. We daren't take the fitting apart in case it breaks completely so we'll leave that major surgery until we arrive in Fiji; the fittings are domestic push-fit ones on hard plastic hoses so they may (we hope) be available at a plumbers merchants there.

 

Eyes are peeled for the first sight of the reef ahead, though we'll likely only see it when we are very close. We'll try and post a photo of it once we are safely in.