We, Lifou Island, New Caledonia

Harmonie
Don and Anne Myers
Sat 6 Sep 2008 08:19
20:55.126S  167:16.704E
 
We delayed one additional day in Port Vila, waiting for the perfect wind for the sail to New Caledonia.  It worked.  We left yesterday morning (Friday, 9/5) with Storyteller and an American boat from Portland, Oregon that happened to be headed in the same direction, and had a marvelous sail all the way to the island of Lifou, which is part of the Loyalty Islands, just east of New Caledonia's 'Grande Terre' (big island).  There were only a couple of bow slams and a few hours of heeling over more than twenty degrees in the beginning of the trip, and then smooth sailing with the wind just forward of the beam the rest of the way.  Aside from the hazards associated with heating up lunch in the port-side microwave with the boat heeled hard to starboard (which include having the glass turntable as well as the heated up lunch fly out at you when you open the microwave door), the hardest part of the 28 hour trip was squeezing our 53 foot selves onto a tiny 18 foot finger in the extremely cozy (as in small) Marina de We.  Although the husband and wife crew on board the French boat next to us were a bit nervous as Don maneuvered (as in shoe-horned) us into our berth, there were no mishaps and we are now bouncing gently between the nervous French boat on our left and another uninhabited boat on our right.  All is right in our world.
 
More about Lifou, the Loyalty Islands and New Caledonia later.
 
Cheers from even further down under.
Anne