18.02S 176.31E Slowly but surely

Salsa af Stavsnas
Ellinor Ristoff Staffan Ehde
Fri 10 Apr 2015 03:11
After being tremendously delayed by the customs yesterday we had to fill our tanks and then finally set sail.We are sailing in tandem with Chez Nouis.
The boat behaves a little more heavy than normal but nothing worrying at all.
Now we cannot see Fiji anymore and that is the first time since August 2014. Thank you Fiji! We have learned the friendly pacific way!
Even in Port Denarau where you saw Fijans in nice uniforms taking care of one pile of tourist after the other, there was always this feeling of warm smiling welcome, Bula!
My presumption was that in a hub like Port Denarau you would see the true face of worned out guides and security people, but no.
And Port Deanarau itself, a luxurious superyacht harbor did not make us feel small and unworthy at all! Quite the opposite, the staff did all they could to help us out.
If you want to find inspiration, especially Mary that worked on superyachts, look att what a supermachine can acomplish in a disaster area
One of our followers contributed the link. We wish we had a boat with all that equipment when it comes to help, not necessary for the rest of the time...
 
One thought that struck me last night was that this mission truly took away all the feelings of downsizing the sailing project, from being quite buzy on how it will be to fly back home and give up this life we are suddenly very focused on a completely diffrent purpose.
Maybe it was right for us, maybe not. But I actually got the question from a person on another boat "why are you doing this?" And she really looked like, why are you so crazy?
And despite the obvious "that we want to make a difference" and even more important "we want to show our kids" it is also an adventure for us, and to be honest we are learning from a total different world of engineering. Believe it or not but there are a lot of thought ways on how to deal with people in need. On top of that you have a regim that suddenly has more question and problems above their nose that they can handle. There are many experiences where aid work had gotten out of hands and where a sensitive area like this can be totally destroyed by a new culture. Well what is "destroyed" anyway? If you are interested and especially interested in the polynesian knowledge around survival at sea and on the small islands, read Wayfinder (thank you Lucas for recommending!). Small islands like the ones we will visit are selfsufficient until a new harvesting culture is coming in and destroys everything.Now, they are not meant to be museums for cruisers or tourists, maybe just a line of survival, if the whole world is drinking Coke and live in cities, we might end up being extinct (and yes you could agree that it might give the world a better environment, who knows).
 
This morning we started out with the Genacker, it flew nicely after we did it the way Ellinor thought best... no comment on that.
The problem now is that we had to give it up as the wind has died to 3-4 knots. The swell is rather steep and 1,6-2 meters high.
Kills any sail that is not blown out by some stronger winds.
 
We have also established radiotraffic with Taupo Maritime Radion on marine short wave, reception very good all the way down to New Zealand.
Now we are hoping to get some traffic with LilExplorer the big cat coming down from Samoa.
Our ETA is set to tuesday morning 9 am.
The only worry I have, is a quite intense low that might interfere with us from sunday night. If it gets nasty we might have to slow down and make landfall later.
If we had come away as planned we would have been better off with better winds now and better winds at the end....
 
From here we can see Chez Nous also running on engine and we have casual radio traffic now and then.
New fishline out and this time we are less fancy, no rod, just a piece of plastic with a heavy line wrapped around, and a bungy cord that hopefully can save the line if a fish get caught.
 
What else? the kids are deeply involved in Mindcraft on Ipads, the adults are exhausted after all the land activity to get ready, loaded and safe going.
We have to start to take Malaria Profilax the day after tomorrow...
Thanks for reading!