Makodroga 17.26.5S178.56.81E

Salsa af Stavsnas
Ellinor Ristoff Staffan Ehde
Sat 3 Jan 2015 18:34
We arrived to Levuka on New Years day, and just had a look around. Nice little city that looks like a film stage but is real...
Friday was a frenetic day. We went to dock, a big concrete construction made for cargoships. At least our mast made it above the edge.
Thank god it was a calm day and the wind was blowing us off the dock. Huge tyres are not the kindest thing to a sailboat.
There we loaded 1 ton of water and Ellinor started to wash our laundry. I started to carry diesel in 25 litre canisters, one in each hand from the gas station 200 meter away. Carry on board, take a hose, blow into the canister, get the diesel into the tank.
Alltogether 250 litres. Feels good to be almost fully loaded again. We can carry 600 litres in total and now we have more than 500.
It is important to be fully loaded if we need to run for the cyclone mooring and there is no wind (you know;the calm before the....). We have used very little fuel in all, the charging is going excellent with wind and sun (and new batteries), we only need to run the generator once per 4th day at most and we run it for 4-5 hours (it uses 0,3litre /hour). That is a day of luxury because then we have 220V and we can charge all the different appliances. With 220 V we can use the blender and cook on electricity (we have one induction plate that is excellent for cooking etc).
As soon as the diesel was on board, Ellinor tok off and started to buy food, I cleaned, made dishes etc. We felt we needed to have one on board all the time to check the boat with the tide and the monstrous dock.
In the evening we went to a restaurant with the family from Lady Carolina, enjoyed the company and being served food and beer!
Yesterday we took off after a visit to the saturday morning market for fruits and vegetables. The prices were higher than Savusau, you could tell that the demand was greater than the supply. As soon as a vendor came to unpack something everybody was there to check, if it was a shortage on for instance bananas, you better buy it directly.
We had a downwind sail with the genacker up, just lovely, not one boat to see anywere and we came back to Makogais reef around 4pm.
Went through the opening and decided to try an uninhabited island called Makodroga. We are here all by ourselves now as Lady Carolina decided to stay one more day, Impi decided to go to Savusavu and True Blue Five wanted to go to other islands further north were you can get easily now as the wind is easing considerably.
Our plan is to stay around here, I will start to work on my "big book" the entrepenerial novel that an editor read this summer and gave thumbs up but 200 points to change. The other book "The ice cream is melting" looks like we will get published with one of Swedens bigger publisher, but as we have not a contract yet I will not write more now.I will get a contract soon and if we agree on both ends I have more job to do there for sure. The plan is to publish 2016.
Erika will have more school now and hopefully we can get some time for Ellinor to paint.
 
By the way, our phone is out of reach now as we have no signal out here.