Photo update No 3 - Kustom Dance in Aneityum

The villagers put one a 'cultural event' for us in Aneityum and it was great - they seemed to enjoy it as much as we did. Here are some photos from the day.

The yachties arrive at the appointed hour

Part of the welcoming committee

The lea garlands are represent peace

Kenneth explains the traditional male clothing, with the aid of a small assistant 

The girl's dress is made from banana leaves

Happy man after the successful fire-making demonstration

The dancing is mostly in an inward-looking circle with firm foot stamping and loud singing

..... and leaf-waving

supper

Di tries the kava, which is a lot stronger than the Fijian stuff

Photo update No 2 - Aneityum

Aneitum is a beautiful island, densely wooded and with streams and rivers flowing down from its peaks. There are several villages around the shoreline but Anelcauhat, where we anchored, is the biggest (about 500 people) with a primary and a secondary school and three churches.

Beach front residence with personal watercraft

Sandy beaches ....

... and black volcanic rocks

The inter-island plane arrives at the grass airstrip - passengers still dress up for flights here!

Aboard a longboat for the start of a coastal hike

Traditional houses

Chris, our guide

The view from the highest section of the walk

Back at sea level 

Refreshment break

A swim for some 

Chris on our dinghy, looking for turtles

Found one!

Laura a bit unsure of the ethics of grabbing wild animals from their habitat!

Snorkellers

One of the many species of reef fish - this is a Honeycomb Grouper - Epinephelus merra (Laura is teaching us things!)

Photo update No 1 - the passage from NZ

We have arrived in Port Vila, the capital, on the island of Efate and have moved from glacial to slow internet so have a chance to post a few pictures from the past 3 weeks.

These first are from the passage from NZ

Perfect conditions at the start as we sail past the Ninepin rock

A pretty chilly wind, though!

One of many rrainbows spotted on passage - we also saw a moonbow in the light of the full moon

Laura with her first flying fish

Waves always look smaller in photos...

.... but the conditions were pretty boisterous at times!

We'll post some photos from Aneityum next

Adding an Angel

We had another brilliant Parasailor sail up to the island of Erromango on Saturday – 53nm completed at an average of 7 knots. Dillons Bay,  off a large village on the west side of the island, was sheltered from the SE wind but quite a rolly anchorage so we didn't sleep too well that night! So yesterday we had a 2-hour sail up to a deserted little bay called Ponamlas Bay ( 18:37.8S/169:02.76E) where we anchored in lovely clear water and good shelter.

 

The bay is beautiful, with high cliffs on its western side, home to hundreds of small bats, and a pebbly beach at the head. However, there were some refracted waves curling in causing us to rock and roll a little so we spent some time experimenting with the setting of a stern anchor to hold our stern into the waves. Unfortunately the sea-bed consists of small rocks and coral rubble and our normally-brilliant Fortress kedge anchor just skated across the surface so we ended up using the grapnel dinghy anchor with an angel. An angel in this context is a heavy weight (in our case a coil of spare anchor chain, lashed with rope around it) which you lower down the anchor line until it touches the bottom; when the boat pulls on the anchor chain it has to lift the angel off the bottom before it exerts any pull on the anchor itself. It worked perfectly so we had a steady night, unlike our friends on Iolea who stayed in Dillons Bay last night and reported three hours of dreadful rolling and 6 hours of moderate rolling when we talked to them on the radio this morning!

 

We're going to spend another day here, doing some baking and boat jobs then will leave at about 3.00am tomorrow for the 80-mile crossing to the Capital, Port Vila, on the island of Efate. The nice SE trade winds are due to be interrupted by a front bringing northerlies at the end of the week so it's a good time to move. We're looking forward to getting to some internet and a laundry and some shops; there's a rumour of a French Patisserie too!

 

Any news from you would be very welcome – to maunie(at)mailasail(dot)com. Has any sense been spoken in the UK, post the Brexit vote? Is it true that Boris Johnson has stepped down from the Tory leadership race, leaving the charismatic Michael Gove and the lovely Theresa May as front runners to succeed the wonderfully-successful David Cameron? Feeling very out of touch here but Laura thanks her dad for the Game of Thrones update!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Safely down from the crater's edge

(click on image to enlarge)

 

Wow! Standing on the crumbly edge of the crater and looking down in to the boiling lava is something we'll never forget! More photos when we (eventually) get to some internet.

 

We're sailing north to the island of Erromango today.

In Port Resolution, Tanna

Good morning from Port Resolution ( 19:31.5S/169:29.78E) on the island of Tanna. Don't forget that you can see out latest locations at https://www.yit.nz/yacht/maunieofardwall We had a superb sail up from Aneityum yesterday with the Parasailor flying the whole (50nm) passage so arrived here about 3.30pm; we were 'racing' the whole way with Iolea and arrived just ahead of them. Port Resolution is just a long, shallow bay open to the north-east and with a reputation for rolly conditions if a easterly swell comes. At the moment it's pretty calm with just a gentle rise and fall but a stern anchor to keep us pointing into the swell might be needed if it increases.

 

The main attraction here is Mount Yasur, an active volcano a few miles inland. The locals do a roaring trade taking visitors up to it in 4x4s, with a final climb to the summit just as dusk arrives – a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to look down into the crater of a volcano and to watch the fireworks of lava explosions. One suspects that anywhere else in the world the health & safety police would have none of this! At the moment we have sunny skies so we are hoping that the clouds will stay away this evening for our tour.

 

In the meantime we are enjoying the spectacle of ten dug-out canoes, each with one man aboard, fishing with nets around us. Laura has promised to bake us some shortbread and Graham is about to embark on the no-fun job of sticking his head and shoulders into the anchor chain locker (accessed from the forecabin) to replace one of the windlass foot-switches which is causing problems. What with that and yesterday's job of replacing the water pump impellor in the generator, the 'boat maintenance in exotic locations' nature of blue water cruising continues.

A Brexit-free update

We are sure that you are all (especially in the UK) thoroughly fed up with the media coverage following the dramatic referendum result so here's a blog update to take your minds off it all...

 

Aneityum continues to delight us, especially as we've had unusually light winds for the past few days; we are becoming increasingly less surprised when the weather 'isn't normal for the time of year'. Light breezes plus sunshine have made things a tad warm below decks but the conditions are perfect for swimming in gin-clear water.

 

Our hike around the coast on Friday was superb. 10 yachties were transported by boat around the coast to the next village to begin the 5-hour walk back to our anchorage. We were led by the wonderful Chris, a 29 year old guy who was born and raised here, spent 16 years in the capital Port Vila but returned to his island last year. He guided us along the narrow muddy path, sometimes along the beach and sometimes climbing a few hundred feet into the bush, all the while telling us about his island. We worked out that English is his 7th language – he speaks his own dialect and three others (pretty much completely different languages) plus Bislama but was taught in a French school so has only learned his amazingly good English relatively recently.

 

Vanuatu must be the most linguistically complex country in the world – there are over one hundred distinct and separate Vanuatu languages spoken by the 250,000 inhabitants and, before independence, Vanuatu was governed by a coalition of the French and the British. Even today, there are French schools and English schools and the village we visited at the beginning of the hike is French-speaking; the men sitting in the shade of the banyan tree in the centre responded cheerfully when Graham greeted them with a "Bonjour! Ca va?".

 

When European whalers and sandalwood traders first arrived in 1820, incidentally decimating the population of many of the islands through the introduction of European diseases, they developed a 'jargon' pidgin-english language which gradually became Bislama, a common tongue across the whole of the country. From 1900 a written version was developed and, in 1981, was adopted by the church here. It's fairly easy to be able to decipher when it's written down; for example, "Good morning, how are you?" is "Gud morning, oslem wanern you oraet?" to which the reply is "Mi oraet, be yu?"

 

During the walk we learned that Chis runs snorkelling tours for the cruise ship passengers and he offered to take us out, promising Laura that she'd meet some sharks, so, the following day, we picked him up from the beach in our dinghy and he guided us over to the reef which was just teeming with tropical fish. The strong current made swimming a bit of a challenge but, sure enough, there were three or four white-tip reef sharks snoozing under coral overhangs. We moved to three other locations then motored over the reef in about two metres of water, seeing perhaps a dozen turtles swimming below us. Chris laughed and said he'd catch one and, after a brief chase, he suddenly dived off the boat and surfaced holding a Hawksbill turtle, about 80cm long. He held it for a few photos then released it to swim off again. All in all it was probably some of the best snorkelling we've done and yesterday the three of us re-visited one of the sites at low tide and spent a wonderful hour watching the fish. This was a great opportunity for Laura to add to her fish id photo guide and she also plans to produce a guide for Chris to use on his tours.

 

We're wanting to move north to Tanna, an island with an active volcano that you can climb, but guess what, we're waiting for weather again! There's a 'quasi-stationary front' slowly approaching us which will bring cloud and drizzle and northerly winds in the next couple of days so we'll have to wait for that to clear and the SE trade winds to return before we move. In the meantime, more exploring and snorkelling...

 

Of course, it's not all plain sailing. We've discovered a leak in our water maker so Graham is trying to create a temporary fix; it looks as though we'll need to get a part sent out from the UK to resolve it completely.