Yacht Club Dinner and Suva Check Out

Last night, after running our errands, we headed back to Kosmos to get ready for the Royal Suva Yacht Club’s 75th anniversary celebration, which was taking place all week. This night they were having a dinner and jazzmusic. We arrived at the yacht club shortly after 1800 (6:00 pm). We wandered around, in hopes of mingling.

Sadly no one spoke to us, beyond to tell us “those seats are probably taken”. In fact we felt quite awkward at the whole event. Interesting how everyone on the streets of Suva were so friendly, but in the yacht club, no one was. We thought there might be some other visiting cruisers around, but everyone appeared to be part of the yacht club. Too bad we did not ask about this when we got our tickets, and we wonder why they even sold us tickets without checking our membership. Continue reading

Suva Check-In and Tim-Tam Restock

This morning the air raid siren briefly went off at 0800. It goes off at regular intervals, almost on the hour, so it probably is a bell of some sort. The officials were to Kosmos at 0900. The customs boat pulled up and five Fijians boarded Kosmos, each with a battery of questions and forms to fill out. The whole process took an hour and the officials were very nice.

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Once they left, we moved from the quarantine area to the anchorage in front of the yacht club and got Kosmos situated. 23 hours after arriving in port, we were ready to go to land. We ran a variety of errands checking in with the yacht club, going to an office to obtain duty free fuel request forms, to another office to request a cruising permit, bank, produce market, grocery store, etc. Our errands took us all over downtown, so we saw a lot and got a good feel for the city. Continue reading

Welcome to Suva, Viti Levu, Fiji

18-07S by 178-25 E – Fiji is made up of 332 islands. Two islands are quite large, and the rest are relatively small. Like the Marquesas, before the arrival of Europeans, Fiji had a thriving population. Tribal warfare among the inhabitants was vicious and cannibalism was a common practice. Also like the Marquesas, the introduction of modern weapons by the Europeans brought warfare amongst the tribes to a new level, causing devastating amounts of death. European diseases added to the death toll. Continue reading

Passage From Tonga to Fiji

On Friday morning we announced we were leaving for Fiji on the morning radio net. A few minutes later, a fellow boater came by in his dinghy and told us that the top headline of the morning was that Fiji had just declared martial law and warned that maybe going to Fiji wasn’t such a good idea. Fiji has had ongoing bouts of political unrest since 1987. We read the news and decided that the situation wasn’t really that bad and decided to go as planned. Continue reading

Snorkeling in Pt. Maurell

We awoke to gray skies, on again off again rain, and winds screaming at 10 27 knots. But, as promised, the water was relatively calm. It is probably rocky in some other anchorages, and rough in the ocean. Needless to say, it was a lazy day. We spent the majority of the day reading and playing “name that tune”. There are some hilarious quotes from the game, including “This is that girl band, Hansen!” and “I don’t recognize this song. Oh wait”¦ wasn’t this our first dance at our wedding?” The crew of Far Niente, Eric and Gisela, had arrived in the anchorage the day before, so in the evening we went over to their boat and hung out with them.

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Yesterday the sun came out. We were thrilled to see the sun after more than a week of gloomy days in a row. We went snorkeling in Point Maurell bay. The snorkeling wasn’t all that spectacular since a lot of the coral has died, but we still saw some cool stuff. There are a few pretty coral formations, and a lot of mauve coral that almost looks like antlers. There is a plant that tends to grow near the mauve coral that is light brown and fuzzy looking. Continue reading