2018, October Leaving Fiji

Leaving Savusavu, October 6, 2018.

We finally set out from Savusavu just at noon on Friday, Oct 6 after days of bad weather.  The sea was still choppy but not too bad. At 3:00 I took over the tiller while Alan went below to check in with the Pacific Seafarers Net.  About half way through the transmission of our position, the radio suddenly stopped, dead.  Nothing he did could get it to work again.  He finally figured out that we had blown a fuse but not what had caused the fuse to blow.  So now what?  Even if we turn back there is no one in Fiji who can fix it.  We already spent weeks trying that  We will be passing close to Taveuni and several of our friends should be at Paradise Resort.  If we stop there, maybe they can help us figure out the problem.   By now  the sun had set, there was no moon and it was very dark  Taveuni has about 6 mooring balls very close to a steep rocky shore.  We knew several them would be in use either by our friends or by the resort dive boats.  We altered our course to take us closer to the island but the closer we got the more we did not want to try to get a mooring ball in the dark.   We  tried to get them on the radio but we were still too far out.  Then we tried to see it there was an internet signal but again we were too far out.  

Another possibility was to use the sat phone to call Chris once a day and give him our position which he could then post to my Facebook page.  Eventually that was what we decided to do.  If we stopped we would loose at least one, maybe two days. So we altered course again and headed on to Samoa. The sea was calm and there was alight wind.  We had sails up but kept the motor on and were making 6 knots.  Just as were passing Taveuni the iPad quit working.  It was the dreaded 180 again.  For about an hour we were without a chart plotter.  Luckily we were in open waters and had a good compass course.  Eventually it came back on again and we were perfectly on course.  It was a beautiful clear night with lots of stars to star by.  One by one they rose ahead of us and a new one took the place to the previous one.  Eventually I realized that I was steering by Orion.  At 3:30 a lovely huge present moon rose directly ahead of us and by 4:30 the sky was starting to lighten.

We have never actually settled on a watch schedule but it goes something like this:  “You look really tired, I’ll take over.  You go sleep as long as you need to”  Typically I go to sleep early, shortly after dinner and sleep for 4 or five hours.  Alan is ready for bed about midnight and needs 7-8 hours of sleep to feel rested.  As long as conditions are benign this works well for us.  Sometimes he will spell me for an hour or so about 4am and then go back to bed until 7 or 8.  He makes breakfast and then I get to go to bed.  If conditions are rough, watches can be as short as 1 or 2 hours each but then neither one of us is rested and we start to make mistakes.  If we get too tired we heave to and both sleep.  

While we are underway we can use the sat phone to get weather reports.  I is a complicated and time consuming process but usually works.  I requires having the phone outside with a direct line of sight to the satellite, challenging if the weather is bad.  Once a signal is established we use the iPad to download the grid files into Predict Wind.  This can take as long as 15-20 minutes.  Once the file is downloaded everything is disconnected and put away and we have the weather report to study at our leisure.