Lovely sail 18.23S 178.51E
Salsa af Stavsnas
Ellinor Ristoff Staffan Ehde
Wed 15 Oct 2014 02:22
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We can see Viti Levu now, one ov the two biggest
islands in Fiji. Viti Levu is the island where you have the biggest cities, one
is Suva, the capital with something close to 400.000 people. A melting pot of
indians, melinese and "europeans". Actually Fiji is a country where they keep
track of your heritage and where they will tick you in a box saying something
like "Mixed European".
It is soon 13.30 and the sun is shining through a a
cloud scattered sky, but as we get closer to Viti Levu we can see the sky
will get darker. There you will have the so called "mechanical elevation",
meaning that as the wind pushes the moist air onto the mountain, the hillside
forces the air to go up up up and there it gets colder and colder till it starts
forming clouds and raining down on the ground again.
We are making something around 6-8 knots going
"downhill" with the wind pushing us and the rolling waves making Salsa surf for
a while, loose the wave and then she is lifted again. It is a marvelous sailing
day. But we have motored almost all night, no wind and some rain, but as we
motored we used the power to make a couple of hundred litres of water. We have
learned that Savu is not the place where you want to fill water.
Savu is a city with lot's of problems but we have
to go there to buy batteries and refill the boat with food, spareparts
etc.
We will try to make the stop as short as possible
and then head for Vanu Levu and Savusavu again. We have decided to make that
area our "station" during the cyclone season.
Yesterday we caught a big barracuda, had to pull it
all the way to the boat before we could release it. We really do not care much
about that meat.
When we had it up to the boat it really gets you
how mean they look, big teeth and that jaw that reminds you of a crocodile. A
barracuda does not look very intelligent to be honest, not even with reading
glasses... Anyway we managed to get it back into the ocean without damage,
hopefully it can live on and be mean to others.
Second round:
So what makes it certain you will catch a fish? You
hoist the genacker (funny with a Polar bear on a sail here), boil spagetthi,
make a good home made pesto and all sit down to just
mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm------------------------vrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!
The wheel on the rod goes off
vrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr! You have to put your
wonderful bowl of warm spagetthi pesto
-vrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr! and run back to the aft and
put a brake on the line and then start the fight, the fish jumped in the
air, like they do on commercial pictures for fishing safaris, you start to pump
with the rod, take in a meter or two, the fish decides to pull again
vrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!
You take back a meter and loose two, the rest of
the family is sitting in the cockpit commenting with their mouths full of
pasta-lucky them!
But Ellinor - of course eats hers up in a hurry and
comes to give me a break so I can eat. It is funny, we are so used to catch fish
now that while we pull them in we talk about other things...
Finally we got the MaheMahe up in the boat, it got
its dose of alcohol and fell asleep. Probably a 10-15 kg hunter that became
partly our lunch today.
And the big news is!!!!
Even Andreas loved the fish today! It is funny how
a picky little fellow can make you happy by just eating his fish and his
potatoes without all these protesting we know we will get when it is
NOT:
A., Pasta
B. Parmesan
C. Panncakes
D. Pizza with only tomato and cheese
E. French Fries
F.Hamburger
G. Ketchup
H. Cake
He actually enjoyed a plain piece of fresh fish
with boiled potatoes and some butter!
Wow!
It was extremely good and there went our last
potatoes wich means we have nothing in the vegetable world left but sprouts wich
we grow ourselves.
Sorry I forgot, we have a jar of pickled cucumber
too.
You might think we are sailing in an archipellago
here in Fiji, you might have heard about the 300 islands and so on. But this
journey for instance is about open sea with some pepper corns of islands on the
horizon, like 4-5 maybe is what you see the most. It is important to keep your
waypoints because this sea is notoriously scattered with reefs that are not even
on the charts.
To give you an idea on how bad chartered this is I
can assure you we have sailed over islands ackording to our chart
plotter.
What you need here are waypoints, that is your
reality.
You can get some good ones from soggypaws (check
their website http://svsoggypaws.com/files/#cruising-guides
) or more info from www.twoatsea.com (Legacy is the boat name and the 2 are Rich and Cindy). Why Im providing some more info is that to our surprise we met two other family boats in Fulaga and the reason they were there was that they had read our blog and decided to check it out. They did not regret it, maybe you can find their blogs Dafne (from USA) and Elena (UK). |