Days 97 & 98 Noumea Harbour

Five Islands
John & Sue
Tue 28 Aug 2012 00:10
We are still anchored in Noumea Harbour. The small invertor we purchased in Panama has stopped working which is a bit of a pain as we recharged and ran the laptops off it. We are having to charge through the Aussie investor through the 12v plug at present. The generator is playing up with an over voltage alarm which is a problem as we need it to run the water maker. We can take on water at the marina if necessary as we can carry enough to last 10 days so if we can't get it sorted out we can get to Brisbane without any problems. Nigel is trying to get it sorted out but the weather is looking good at the moment so hopefully we won't be delayed too much by this. We spent much of Monday morning walking around the various government departments in Noumea to complete our check in requirements, along with about 5 other boat crews. The officials here are a pleasure to deal with, pleasant and helpful and they don't ask for gifts or money to cover their expenses, and the whole process cost nothing. They did send one official from quarantine to check our fruit and food on the boat to make sure we weren't importing anything bad but all we lost were our eggs. They told us if we peeled our veges they would be OK, so we spent a couple of hours peeling onions and potatoes and freezing them. We thought we would lose all of our lady finger bananas but Laurie and Karen from Tropicale (from Airlie Beach) told us that if we mash them up with coconut milk and freeze it is like ice-cream. So we spent an hour peeling and mashing up bananas, mixing in coconut cream and honey and freezing it. It is beautiful, either by itself or in a smoothie.
We had a P&O cruise ship come into the harbour on Monday afternoon, was quite impressive to watch it pass just 40 metres from us. It only stayed about 8 hours and left again around 11pm, not a very long stay. The weather here has been spectacular, beautiful sunny days and lovely cool evenings, so much nicer than Soggy Suva.