Theo, Patrick and Susannah completed the 600 mile or so trip to Port Vila in Vanuatu, which took about 5 days. Pretty lumpy horrid sea to start with, and we had no weather information as our anemometer had broken. Replacement would have taken one week’s delivery time from New Zealand so we decided to push on. We had to take in a reef in the dark which up to now we had largely avoided. Our usual routine is to ‘put the boat to bed’ before nightfall, taking in reefs as necessary, changing back to Wing on Wing if we have the parasailor up, and removing the bimini. We decided that 2 reefs were not enough so went for the 3 reef option which was a good call as the weather really got up during the night.
Port Vila was charming although again all our fresh food was confiscated - we should have known as we had been through the biosecurity process before at Galapagos/Tonga/Fiji but we had got a bit lax and had to watch our big bag of lemons being lifted off the boat. Susannah then departed to catch her plane back to London, and Aurora joined the boat.
