Destiny or dumb luck? Who knows, but Ann and I experienced a magical day today. We met the folks who found the bottle we dropped over the side at the equator back toward Mexico. It travelled 5,000 miles in a little over a year and ended up here in Fiji where we’re cruising this year.

To be exact, it ended up on an almost deserted beach on the windward side of Nairai Island. Almost deserted except for Boto and his family who we met today. Boto’s comment about it: “I saw it half buried in the sand and just kicked it. Just then I saw something inside”. That something was our note, carefully wrapped in a plastic bag along with a Charisma boat card with our contact information. He then showed us the bottle, the notes and even the plastic bag that he had saved. (we have pictures that we’ll try and post as soon as we have a minute)

This is the beach where our bottle washed up.

Boto (on the left) showed us exactly where he found the bottle.

Bob reunited with the bottle and note.

Here's the note we put inside the bottle.

Side Two of the note.

It was a long day getting here. We left at 0700, since it is 40 miles and we knew that since this island is very rarely visited and there is therefore almost no information on getting through the reef or where to anchor. We had to get here in the early afternoon when we have the best visibility to avoid reef and underwater rocks waiting to slash a hole in an unsuspecting boat.

Our plan was looking good as we approached the island in blue skies and fair winds as they say. But as we got closer a big squall threatened to ruin the day. It poured for almost an hour (did I mention that Ann had just taken over driving – perfect timing!) and it was beginning to look hopeless when as suddenly as it came, it passed. Sunshine! And the outer reefs are just 4 miles away. We could see the white churning water. Good. That means we can avoid it! I had set up a gps course in through the pass. We turned towards the island and began cautiously moving forward confident in the deep blue of the water around us. But, as we for closer, the gps course went right over a light blue patch. What to do? I opted to go visual and turned out a good choice. Turns out the gps is several hundred yards off here and we got closer, we saw it would have put us right on top of coral lurking just below the water. Whew!

That's Nairai in the background.

Once inside the main reef the lagoon is quite obstacle free and we headed toward the village of Lawaki where we had a vague plan to be met by Boto. Initially we saw no-one and were a bit worried that this trip might become a bust, when we saw a panga headed toward us with a bunch of waving people in it among them Boto and his sister Esther. What a joy to hear the shouts: “Charisma, Charisma! I’m not sure who was more excited!

Here's the longboat coming out to meet us.

After some introductions in the bouncing waves of the lagoon with their boat alongside ours, they told us they would show us “the anchorage”. It’s a little exposed. We’re just sitting about 100 yards or so or the side of the island and just north of the bottom tip. We’re in 27 feet over sand, so Charisma’s anchor is good and dug in, if the wind shifts at all to the southwest we have to leave. Fast. But, for now, we’re good although I’m seeing some lightning in the distance.

Anyway, flash forward to Boto’s house where we were taken around the southern tip of the island by panga, we were completely made to feel part of their family. We met Boto’s 80 something year old father Elisha, Boto’s wife Vika, sister Esther, her husband Able and a half dozen other wonderful young guys whose names I can’t remember.

As we came in off the beach (having to wade through the water the last 50 yards and where Abel picked a coral sea snake out of the water and threw it to one side) and walked up to Boto’s house just past the palm trees, we met his wife Vika, who was already cooking a small feast (by our standards) just for Ann and I. It’s a little unnerving sitting and eating from among a half dozen plates of food including fried eggs, rice, tinned beef mixed with noodles, fried breadfruit and fish caught while we were on the way in the panga, but we’re getting used to it. It’s the Fijian way of showing hospitality. They will not touch the food while you are eating. And the Kava helps! They treated us to some really wonderful Nairai kava. Boto warned us that Nairai kava was very strong. He was right! I think the glow is still around us four hours later sitting on the boat! (Kava also makes me use a lot of exclamation marks!!!!)

Vika in her kitchen.

Going ashore.

Boto making Kava in his house (the white bucket is for the water to mix with the powder).

Anyway, Ann and I keep exchanging knowing glances that said; “Are we in a dream?”

I think we are. We’re very clearly living a dream. Today’s dream was finished by an almost surreal panga ride back through the surf and reef strewn waters around the tip of the island and arriving at Charisma just as twilight was turning to darkness. Then we were gifted with a half dozen coconuts, some mangoes and a huge stalk of bananas.

Tomorrow, Boto is going to pick us up after he goes fishing with the village chief and together we’ll all go in to the village for sevusevu.

Oh my.

Ann and I also want to add a special “Thank you” to Boto’s other sister Vani. When Boto found the bottle he wasn’t sure how to contact us since he doesn’t have Internet here. He gave all the information to Vani and it was she who contacted us and has coordinated today’s meeting. The bonus-she is currently living and working in San Rafael, Calif! How’s that for a small world? We’re now even Facebook Friends (her FB name is VeeBee). We’re planning on meeting her during the holidays when we fly home to visit.

This is a gorgeous spot. Too bad it’s just a stopover for us. Looks like it would be fun to explore. Oh well, not this year, we’re on a mission to get to Nairai Island while the weather’s favorable (which it should be starting tomorrow).

Speaking of which-we left Cousteau this morning in rainy squalls. It’ the price we sometimes pay to stage for a destination where we want to spend some time. Sucking it up a bit today means we’ll have an extra day or two of good weather at Nairai. We sailed 30 miles today, and we have 40 to go, tomorrow.

Our sail today was 7 hours. Besides the rain it was squally gusting between 20 and 30 knots with 5 foot seas. Early on we had a good wind direction. Beam reach. With double reefed main, jib and stays’l we were storming along at 7.5 plus knots. BUT, later in the morning, it got windier and it headed us until we were 50 degrees. That’s about as close to the wind as we get sail in those kind of seas, and we had to furl the jib. Too much wind. So most of the day was under triple reef main and stays’l doing more like 5 knots. We had to tack a few times to make it here. Not the best, but when the sun peeked through and the sea turned blue, it was glorious!

So, here we are. We got in with time to put away the boat, take a shower (with the teapot of couse) and have a Charisma. Now Ann has graciously offered to cook dinner tonight. Right now she’s making a lot of grumbling noises from the galley. She has very nicely offered to make her eggplant parmigiana tonight, but sometimes that can be scary. The sounds that is. There’s a lot of swearing going on. Ann’s a real sailor now you know, so swearing is part of dinner if she cooks.

Anyway, that’s our report from paradise for today.

Summary: Long windy sail with Ann swearing a blue streak in the galley and Bob hiding out in the cockpit writing the blog.

We’re just hanging today, anchored off Couseau Resort on the corner of the bay. Tomorrow morning we’ll leave for Koro (30 miles), which will be our overnight stop on the way to Nairai (another 40 miles). We need to break up the trip to allow for entering through the reef in sunlight. You can’t trust the gps-it’s sometimes off by 1/4 mile and sometimes dead on. The main thing is to use it as one tool, verify with radar and have a good visual. There are a ton of reefs in these bays that are just not even charted, so the visual part is essential when you enter an anchorage for the first time. We’ve just been waiting for good weather. It’s been 100 percent overcast for days, with winds out of the south and right now it’s raining. Tomorrow, the clouds are supposed to start receding and the wind backing to give us a more favorable angle. If the forecast is correct, we should have a beam reach in 20 knots and 4 to 5 foot seas tomorrow, then 15 knots and almost clear sky for our arrival at Nairai. Should be an interesting week. Cross fingers for our fishing for the next two days. We’re on our last bit of Mahi and would like some fresh fish. Last night I poached the Mahi in a coconut/eggplant curry over rice. I have to say it was yummy!

Today’s only event was getting up at 0600 to untangle the anchor chain. I knew I should have put a float on it, but didn’t and sure enough we got short chained during the night. We wanted to untangle from the hidden rock before the wind came up-hence the early effort. It came off fairly easily and I tied a fender to the chain about thirty feet out on a twenty foot line,(we’re in about sixty feet of water) so hopefully it’s floating the chain up off the rocks and coral on the bottom. We’ll find out in the morning!

Here’s today’s tidbit on provisioning. We left NZ with 54 lbs of ground coffee (dark roast, vacumn packed). As of today, we have 23 lbs left. We’re doing pretty good. There’s no good coffee here (unless you like instant), so this was an essential provisioning plan. We’re also down to our last French Press having broken two so far. If we break this one it’s “cowboy coffee” for the rest of the trip.

So I spent a few more hours today troubleshooting our electronics issue. As you might recall all the instruments up at the helm have quit! When I turn them on they run for a few minutes then the whole network shuts down. I have to unplug the helm instruments to bring the other one in the nav station back online. It’s inconvenient at the very least since Ann has to read the depth and other info from the cabin and then shout it up to me at the helm. (And sometimes he listens! LOL! -most times! But when he has visibility he overrides my calls!)

But…today, I took apart the network and tried each of the helm instruments, one at a time, by itself to see if one of the three was malfunctioning. Turned out each one tripped the network. Can’t be that all three have gone bad.

So…I have cleaned every single connection, I tried replacing the SealTalk NG “Tee” connector (damn lucky I had a spare waaayy out here as there’s probably not another one between here and Aukland!). Voila! Once I replaced that the network worked. It’s now been on for about four hours and no problem. I’m going to turn it off for the night and then light it up again tomorrow and hope it still works. I’m hoping it’s a defective connector because I have run out of any other possible idea.

Good timing if it really works since our next leg to Nairai will be the most challenging. There are zero waypoints into Nairai for the gps, the charts are almost non-existent. We found a chart of the general area today-it was based on a survey done in…1877!

So, good light to be able to see the reef and a functioning depth sounder visible at the helm will be a happy thing.

I don’t think I mentioned last night that I cooked our new specialty-fish in coconut milk in a pumpkin. The only issue is while it was in a Pyrex dish, the Pyrex exploded in the oven! Good thing I lined it with foil-our dinner wasn’t ruined nor was the oven-just scared the crap out of us! Luckily the clean up was not too hard, it only took Ann a few minutes to safely remove the remaining glass shards and clean the oven!

Tonight I used the leftovers and added more Mahi, some eggplant, the end of our heart of palm, some yellow curry and served it all over rice. Yuuummmmy!

From Ann- and to stay out of the captain’s way I took a hike to Cousteau. Actually, right up front I have to confess that I “snuck” onto the Cousteau property and touched their dock without going through the “Gestapo” at the front gate.( I sure hope that Rich from SV Legacy is reading this!) Yep, I walked all the way to Cousteau via the beach! It was a beautiful walk but my favorite part was as I returned on the road.

I saw a bus stop and unload some people but ignored it and tried to duck under the cloud of dust that resulted. A few yards down the road I noticed two young children making their way up into the hills. We all called out, “Bula!” and five steps farther down the road I hear, “I know you!” and they were right! I knew these two kids too! I retraced my steps….

And sure enough the two kids hiking up the hill in their school uniforms were the same cute kids who I had met at the marina dock on Sunday. They were trying to get their parents to come see the cool sea life they has found. I noticed and asked to be shown their special “finds”. Well, ends up that Sterie and Walther remembered me too! “I know you!” they shouted! Imagine that..I know people that I run into in the middle of Fiji! And so darling, Steri commented…”It is so nice to see you again!” No small deed goes undone. These people are really special. This made my day!

Yup, sometimes that’s the smartest move.

We were going to go out to Cousteau Resort to stage for our move to Koro and then Nairai, but the wind is really not cooperating. SO-we stayed in Savusavu and will be here another day or two while we wait for a high pressure system that is to the south of us, to move west.

In the mean time we did two things today:
-I spent an hour or so crunched down in the lazarette tightening the steering cables. The wheel has been showing some slackness which is not good. I think our two tough passages to/from NZ stretched the cables a bit. Once stretched, they can wreak other havoc from chafe and other stuff. So…I tightened the adjustment bolts about 1/2 inch on each side and we have a nice tight steering system again.

-We went ashore for a walk. We climbed the hill just adjacent to where we’re moored. We got about halfway up the hill and…uh oh-a really big doggie was intently watching us. This was a 100 lb. very fierce looking Rhodesian Ridgeback (I believe they were bred to fend off lions!). I said to Ann: “I think our hike is over now”. We started our strategice retreat, but Mr Ridgeback had other ideas. He came charging toward us, barely stopping about twenty yards away, staring with huge dark eyes daring us to even move. I decided we had one chance before he tore us apart; “hi, puppy, how are you!” I uttered in my best, highest, puppy-friendly voice. That’s when he charged. I closed my eyes, started into the fetal position, and next thing I knew….he was licking my face. Close call!

So, another day or so here and south we go. Koro Island, then Nairai to meet the folks who found our bottle that we threw over at the equator. That should be interesting because we can find zero information about Nairai-no charts, no waypoints, nothing. We’ll be exploring on our own.

Wish us luck!

I’ve posted pictures back to August 12th.  As always, clear your cache/history on your browser or you might not be able to see them.

There are somewhat more pictures at https://www.facebook.com/2Johnson (go to “Albums”) and the resolution is better, but there’s no story.  You don’t have to be a facebook user to access as I marked them as “public”.

First shower in a month for that matter too. We’ve been taking teapot showers in the cockpit and eating fish or whatever veggies we can cobble together from the islands. Today, first thing we hit Fiji Meats for steak and “streaky bacon” (If you don’t order “streaky” you get Canadian bacon. Nothing against Canadians, but that’s NOT bacon). Tomorrow morning, I’m getting a bacon and egg sandwich!

The other highlight from today was just checking in with some of the other cruisers here. A couple of them we haven’t seen since Mexico almost two years ago, but really fun catching up with “the community”.

Our disappointment for the day was that the Vodafone place didn’t get a new internet dongle as promised so we are still “Facebookless” (and “NYTimesless”). But we have hopes that the thing will make it down from Lambasa tomorrow as promised (yeah, right. This is Fiji, we’re on island time. We’ll be lucky if it makes it here before we leave in a couple days)

That’s it for today. Can’t believe it’s “Labor Day” already, but can tell because NOBODY IS RESPONDING TO THIS BLOG. Uh, OK, I’m feeling better now.

😉

Yep, we’re back in Savusavu. I was looking at the weather and thinking, “Do we want to sit in an exposed anchorage (albeit with very good holding) and get beaten up with wind and rain for three days, or do we want to go to Savusavu and stock up from a real market and most importantly in this modern world, replace our broken internet dongle so Ann can play Words with Friends” (OK, and so I can read the NYTimes). Hmmm. That took about 30 seconds of thought when we woke up and saw a break in the clouds.

Well, they fixed the hole in the dock at Waitui. Now about that marina sign...?

So, after 9 ½ hours (at an average of about 7 knots motorsailing) we’re back in the Savusavu. It’s nice sometime to be in a familiar place. Waitui Marina answered on our first call on the VHF said they had a mooring and Isiri came out in a dink to guide us, as he put it “to our old mooring”. Nice to be remembered. We got in around 5:15 local time, very efficiently dropped the dinghy in the water and got the outboard on, so we had time for a Charisma to watch the last of the sunset. Then we jumped in and took said dinghy ashore to our favorite Chinese restaurant, the “Savusavu Chinese Wok”. As we were sitting out on the porch listening to the cars and people we realized it’s been weeks since we’ve heard “noise”. We really haven’t been around either people or cars. It’s comforting in a way to be back here, but we’ll be over that by the time the dogs on shore start barking at 0500. Anyway, we’re here long enough to a) stock up and replace our broken internet thingy and b) wait for favorable weather to head to Koro Island-which is more or less south of here, then on the Nairai. We’ll see when the wind will cooperate. Certainly not for a couple days at the earliest as there is a low bouncing around just to the north.

Stay tuned…

That’s really about all that we can say about today (except that I can’t believe it’s already September!).

A blustery day anchored at Mattei, Taveuni.

We were hoping to dinghy in to the beach for breakfast at a little resort with a very cute, tiny restaurant. We walked by it yesterday on our way to our failed attempt to have lunch at the little pizza place up on the hill. Failed on both accounts that these are literally the only two places on this side of the island worth visiting for a meal. The pizza place, after a 30 minute hike, was closed! Grrr. So we called our friend Wani, the taxi driver (who is also the Chief of his village on the NE side of the island) and he picked us up and took us into Somosomo to resupply. You think a place with a name like that would be at least a township, but it’s not much more than a ferry stop. There’s a couple stores, the only ATM on the whole island, a market where you can get wine, rum and beer (but they were out of reasonable looking meat products, so we’re pretty much going vegetarian for the next “some” weeks until we get to Suva or catch more fish). And there’s a great outdoor market. Actually a series of stalls along the roadside with some of the nicest vegetables you’ll ever see. We stocked up on cabbage (very long lasting), potatoes (ditto), eggplant, bok choy (very short lasting) and some other stuff that will get us through at least a couple weeks of fresh food.

Yesterday we made it into the outdoor market at Somosomo.

Today was a bust of a different kind. We really wanted to go to this little breakfast spot. We walked in yesterday to look at the menu and were taken by how sweet the proprietress was. She was delightful. There were only a handful of tables and it looked out at the water where Charisma is anchored. We had visions of pulling in to their beach on our dinghy and walking barefoot up the path. But…the wind was howling this morning. The reality of cruising sometimes is you just have to stay on the boat. We would have been soaked if we had even made it in without capsizing. “Maybe tomorrow” is our mantra out here. We have nothing else to do, right? We’ll take a look at the weather report tonight and see what tomorrow looks like. Last night’s report showed a brief respite before more rain and wind, so who knows.

Our other highlight for today; Ann called her good friend Chuckie (Charlotte, but she doesn’t like that name-sorry Chuckie) and we called my folks. My Dad was out doing errands, but we had a nice chat with Mom. Good to be able to touch bases from home.

So, that’s my story for today.