28/10/09 - 18.08S 178.25E at 23.12 - Crossed geographical dateline and arrived Suva, Fiji
Flying Cloud
Julian Nichols
Wed 28 Oct 2009 21:11
In the morning, to hide the noise of the engine out came the guitar (or was it the other way around?). Anyway, Jenny soon demonstrated that she had played before and came from a musical family...
I on the other hand exhibited no real musical prowess. If only i could actually play this thing! Getting the chords is one thing, doing something with them and putting them in some structure reasonably quickly is quite another.... Next stop lessons i think....
At 10am we crossed the Geographical dateline.... what a great excuse to crack open some champagne (only 1 small glass each, the rest was saved for lunch).
By the end of the trip we will have crossed the Tropic of Cancer, the Equator, the Dateline and the Tropic of Capricorn, and we will be exactly half way around the world from where we started in Portugal in January.
As we motor sailed along towards our destination of Viti Levu the sky began to cloud over. A good excuse to bring Pilates forward to pre- lunch. Just as well because after that the heavens opened.
Of course as we came to get the main down as we approached the reef, it wouldn't budge. So i quickly went up the mast to explore why, only to discover that the main halyard had jumped / split its sheeve. A few minutes work with a knife soon had the sail down - and another item on the to do list.
As we came into anchor we quickly pulled in the fishing lines to discover another, albeit smaller, Dorade. As Jenny had gone to bed by the time we pulled in at midnight this was my first real test of gutting a fish, and it actually went quite well!