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!
|