Fulaga, Lau Group, Fiji
By: Kerry
I’m not sure how many hundreds of sculpted islets there are scattered across the lagoon, or how many different photos it would be possible to take of them, but here’s a few…
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Fulaga, Lau Group, Fiji
By: Kerry
We arrived in Fulaga on Sunday, but that being church day, we were invited to postpone our sevusevu until Monday morning. Maunie and Exit Strategy (both friends of ours) were the only boats in the anchorage when we arrived, but throughout the day, six other boats, who’d also taken advantage of the weather window, arrived.
Vanua Balavu, Lau Group, Fiji
By: Kerry
Our anchor position in the Bay of Islands. Yellow is land. White is water. According to the chart plotter, we are parked pretty close to the lookout on the top of the hill…
More than elsewhere, sailing in Fiji is about alignment: wind direction, wind strength, current, tide, sun angle – they all need to be in your favour to negotiate the inter-island passages, the countless reefs and bommies and narrow passes.
Little Bay, Vanua Balavu, Lau, Fiji
By: Kerry
To stay in Little Bay, the Cruising Guide said we needed to do sevusevu at Maravu village, a little further along the coast. We dinghied around the corner to a lovely beach fronting a copra plantation, and walked 30 minutes through scrubby bush along the coast, through plantations of bananas and cassava to Maravu.
The village is the home of former Fijian Prime Minister, Laisenia Qarase, who was ousted by Commodore Bainimarama in the 2006 coup (and was subsequently convicted of corruption).
Little Bay, Vanua Balavu, Lau Group, Fiji
By: Kerry
Twenty-three years ago, I sailed into the Lau Group on another boat, when this remote Fiji island group was officially ‘off-limits’ to cruisers. We were the first foreign yachties to visit in years (we had special permission) and my favourite memory is of having a bunch of the local kids on board for a ‘cool’ drink.
Most of them had never seen a white face before and none of them had experienced anything colder than ‘tropical’. I watched one little guy sneak the ice out of his glass and hide it in his hot little hand to keep for later… Continue reading
Vanua Balavu, Lau Group, Fiji
By: Kerry
In the middle of the night on the shortest day of the year we entered into the western hemisphere and finally, literally, sailed off the edge of the chart.
It was as black as the inside of a cow and almost as wet.
We’d been waiting for a break in the prevailing southeast trade winds to make a dash east to the Lau Group of islands, the farthest east of the islands of Fiji.
Finally, we had a window – really only a louvre – and we sailed out of Savusavu at sunset, with the wind backing to a northerly and then dying altogether.
Around midnight, in pouring rain, we crossed 180 degrees longitude – the ‘actual’ dateline (though the practical dateline does a dog-leg here to embrace Tonga and Fiji in the same day-zone as Australia/NZ).
Our Navionics electronic chart stopped right there: to plot a further course, we had to scroll right around the world and pick up on the other side of the invisible 180 degree line.
Reassuringly, despite our sailing off the edge of the chart, there was no sign of dragons…
We motored almost all of the 108 nautical miles to Vanua Balavu, in the north of the Lau Group, as there wasn’t enough wind to sail. At dawn, we converged on the pass, along with four other boats that had sailed from various points, and by late morning we’d dropped anchor off the village of Daliconi.
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Savusavu, Vanua Levu, Fiji
By: Kerry
Sailing into the dawn
At last! An ‘easy’ passage from New Zealand! We left Auckland as planned on Friday 8th – the rain stopped chucking it down about an hour before we cast off – and headed north. Starting from Auckland rather than Marsden Cove added 60-odd miles to the trip, making it a 1260 nautical mile voyage, following the rhumb line – which we just about did.
We saw no more than 20 knots of breeze the whole way, and barely a white cap or any kind of swell. A lot of the time we were motoring as there wasn’t enough wind (MUCH the preferred option to too much!) but we did have some lovely sailing here and there (including finally flying our spinnaker for the first time ever), and some really charmed conditions.
One day, it was so calm we stopped the boat and Verdo and I jumped in for a swim, mid-ocean – felt fabulous! Only one fish en route – but we might have done better if we’d had the lines out more often…
One night was particularly stunning – not a breath of wind and a zillion stars reflected in the inky surface of the sea. As the boat cut through the water it sent out ripples of phosphorescence and we left a glowing wake behind us. Every now and then some mysterious sea creature would flee from us, trailing a rapid silver zig zag. Then a red half moon rose like a chalice out of the sea, casting red slivers of reflection across the water all the way to the boat: the proverbial stairway to heaven!
A very special night.
Of course, it wouldn’t be a Lemon crossing without an ‘incident’! On Sunday morning (two days out) we were motoring with no sails up and I noticed a chafe mark on the main halyard. To cut a long story short, Verdo went up the mast and confirmed that the halyard had chafed most of the way through, where it runs across the new mast track stopper block installed by Bart the mast builder after our trip back from Fiji last year, when we sheered it off the mast.
Those of you familiar with the mast saga will understand our despair… Just as we thought we were finally finished, we are back to the same situation we were in when we arrived here last year.
Only this time, we can’t use the mainsail at all….
On the upside, we were doing 10 and 11 knots with just our gennaker up on the way here – so who needs a mainsail anyway?
We arrived in the early hours of Saturday morning, having slowed the boat down the night before so as to arrive in daylight. It’s nice to be back.
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Fairway Bay, Auckland, NZ
We arrived back on Sel Citron in Auckland a week ago, thinking we’d have a couple of weeks at least to get organised and then head to Fiji. But Bruce, our weather guru, identified a weather window for us to leave tomorrow (Friday) – and it doesn’t look like there’s another one in the next couple of weeks. Even then, it might be more of a louvre, than a window! So, not wanting to have (yet) another crap crossing, we’ve scrambled to get ourselves organised and ready to leave tomorrow.
Verdo, who crewed for us on the trip back from Fiji last year, is going to do the trip up with us. We hope to be there in about a week, and plans for the season are to explore the eastern side of Fiji, including the Lau Group. We’ll be in Fiji until the end of November. Visitors welcome!
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Waiheke Island, New Zealand
By: Kerry
When the tallest thing around is a palm tree, the sky seems a whole lot bigger.
Call me a nerd, but one of the things I most enjoyed about Fiji was the extravagant cloud formations. Almost every day, there would be some vast, abstract masterpiece splashed across the sky.
Often, there would be a whole catalogue of cloud ‘types’ jumbled up together: sheep’s wool cumulus and mare’s tails, a mackerel sky, lenticular pancakes and anvils of thunder.
I left it a bit late in the season to make any real photographic study of them, but here’s a selection of Fiji skies…
(Click on a photo and you get a pop-up gallery. To exit the gallery, click the X that appears at the top left of the black side panel when you run your mouse over it).
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By: Kerry
The second time I hitched myself to a kite, I made the mistake of glancing down to see where to place my foot. In the split second it took me to look up again, I’d made a Superwoman-like leap about four metres into the air – much to the amusement of all onlookers.
As I hurtled about 10 metres forward, I had time (in that slow-motion vortex you experience in the grip of an adrenalin rush) to look down and hope, helplessly, that I wouldn’t land on the coral below, before I face-planted into deep water.
With the wind blowing a little over 20 knots, the kite took off with me attached, being ‘body-dragged’ through the water: just as I was supposed to do. Woo-hoo!
Whenever we’ve been in Musket Cove and the tides (exposing the sand bar) and winds (15 knots or more) have aligned, kitesurfing guru Lionel has been giving us kiteboarding lessons. We started out with a one-square-metre training kite on land. Damian then sustained his golf wound, and couldn’t progress to the next step, so the class came down to the girls: Michelle, Suzie and me.
Suzie started earlier in the season and bought her own gear. She’s a step ahead of Michelle and me and, in the last week before we left, managed to crack it, getting up on her board and tearing across the bay, flat out.
Michelle and I are still at the body-dragging stage, where we fly a seven or nine-metre kite and get dragged through the water without the board attached to our feet and the added complication of having to steer the board as well as the kite.
I’d tried body dragging only once before my Superwoman act. This time – once I landed and the kite took off – I quickly steered the kite into the fly zone, lay on my back with my leading arm extended to act as a keel, and managed to body drag up-wind, with (according to the guru) perfect form. I was quite chuffed.
The interesting bit came when I tried to tack and the kite momentarily passed through the power zone, launching me into the air again…
Maybe next season we’ll get board-borne.
*Thanks to Graham Keating, Maunie of Ardwell for additional pix.
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Sel Citron 