Ground hog day, up at 4:00am and another 60ish nautical miles to cover. With the sunrise, again, out came the main (reef 2, 23 knots of wind) and jib. Soon we were cruising along in the upper 6 to low 7 knot range. Perfect! We managed to sail about 3/5th of the way before, as forecast, the wind dropped and our speed was down to a 3.5 knot average. Ugh. The big excitement I suppose is that today we crossed our previous path completing my circumnavigation of all of the Fiji islands nearly 1,000nm later. Well, I did miss Kadavu (sailed past the north side) but I managed to visit all the other outlying islands. Pretty cool.
A few hours out, we started cleaning the inside of the boat and after setting the hook, we gave the outside a wash to get off all of the salt from the past week. It always feels so much better to walk on a clean deck and to look out of clean windows. To cool off afterwards we took a swim to checkout a bommie nearby (probably 10 feet below the surface) and to dive the anchor (dug deep). While Carl was still snorkeling, a long boat came by and Vuvi stopped for a chat. He works at a nearby 5 star resort (we looked it up, it is $1,000USD per night). He has been there three years and today was dropping off and picking up couples from their own private beach afternoon. Always interesting to learn more about people’s family (three daughters and two sons, the two oldest in high school in Suva) and a bit about their life. Too soon he had to head to pick people up but gave us the green light to anchor and visit the beaches.
Some grilled lamb shoulder and baked potatoes for dinner and life was feeling pretty damn great. All of our big sailing days are behind us, just three or four short days (less than 25nm each) before our haul out in a week and a half. Wow has our sailing time flown past.
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