Mar 9, 2015
back in Fiji
The flight from LA was relatively uneventful although at one point i saw that we were facing 50 mph headwinds. Despite that we made good time and actually landed early although the last hour was so bumpy that they were unable to serve coffee. An overnight flight landing at 6am and no coffee! On the ground, I collected my 3 fifty pound bags and put myself into the “stuff to declare” line and finished up my last banana. Customs actually went quite smoothly. I showed the paperwork stating that I was joining a “yacht in Transit” and was waved on through. I had arranged for the taxi to pick me up before I left. I did not expect Alan to meet me since it was 6am and he never gets up before 8 but there he was with a cup of coffee in his hand. It is so good to be back. The weather is warm. People are friendly. There was a band playing fijian songs and singing as we came through customs. There is my wonderful husband and the smiling taxi driver. Life is good.
Back at the marina there are greetings of “Bula” and “welcome back” everywhere. It really feels like coming home to a small community where everyone knows you, quite different from life in the big city.
Back on the boat the first job is obviously to up pack and stow the contents of my 3 bags. It is like Christmas for Alan as one thing after another comes out of the bag; things that he had ordered, treasures form Minney’s boat yard, goodies from the 99 cent store including 25 bard of wonderful sea salt chocolate. Of course once everything is out of the bags the boat is a mess, especially since sails, dingy, etc are stowed inside because of cyclone threats. I had figured it would take me a week to get everything put away and it does. At least the weather is cooler, thanks to the cyclone threat. One section at a time, everything comes out gets sorted and repacked,under the bed, in the closet, behind the cushions, under the seats. Three large bags of old stuff go out to be replaced with the new. Andi it all fits, better than before. All of the cabin stuff that is. We are left with a pile of tools and boat parts that need to go into the engine room, which is Alan’s bailiwick. Of course, since they are all things that he needs for the project that he is working on, they can’t be put away yet so they sit around for weeks until they are gradually used or put away as the projects are completed.
Speaking of projects, as far as I can tell very few of the 117 jobs on the list actually got done while I was gone. The two big “must be completed before we can go sailing” jobs are still only partly complete after 6 weeks. Job one is a box for the cockpit to get hold the switches and gages . We had a number of problems on our crossings because these kept getting soaked when waves filled the cockpit. After years of talking about it, Alan had actually designed the box, bought the wood and cut out the pieces before I left. It is almost put together. It will have a place to hold the iPads, a spot for coffee cups and a fold out shelf that can be used as a table. The pieces are all sanded and smooth and look beautiful and the basic parts are to gather but as far as i can tell it is going to take 2-3 more weeks to finish it. His excuse is that he was waiting for the parts that I brought back.
The other must-do project is the mizzen boom. About half way to Tahiti on our long passage we noticed that long cracks had appeared in it. Alan put a couple of clamps on it to keep it from splitting further until we could get it fixed. Since we kept hitting our heads on the clamps, he replaced them with smaller, better clamps. And there they are, all these miles later the boom still has the clamps on it. He did take the boom off the mast but nothing further has been done. It needs to have some kind of glue injected into the cracks and then be clamped together until it dries. Then it needs to be painted and put back together. So that’s one more project that will take a couple of weeks. It is starting to look like it will be well into May before we are able to go anywhere. I could have stayed home and spent some more time cleaning out the house. Although it is fairly clear that not much was going to happen as long as I was gone so it’s a good thing I cam back when I did.
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