Today is our final day in our
favorite cruising spot – Fiji. It is
with mixed feelings, that we leave this wonderful country, although we are
looking forward to our next adventures.
We have kept busy these past few days getting ready for our crossing to
Vanautu. We’ve provisioned the boat with
six weeks’ worth of food, since there is very limited supplies in the remote
country of Vanautu.
Today, we’ve done the final
touches in preparation – I’ve prepared four dinners for our expected four night
crossing, although we usually don’t eat much the first day or two while we get
our sea legs. I will start with the
sea-sickness medication tonight and will stay on it to hopefully prevent it.
There is a saying in the cruising community.
“If you get sea sick you feel like you are going to die. As it progresses you wish you would die”. (My girlfriend Krys who came with us on the
leg from San Fran to Mexico knows this experience all too well!)
We have the life jackets at
the ready and all the jack lines and tethers are on. This is a system by which you tether on to
your life jacket and the jack lines attached to the boat, to prevent you from
being swept overboard in the event of bad weather. As a safety precaution we always “clip in”
during the dark – which runs from 6:00 p.m to 6:00 a.m. each day. I still find that everything intensifies
during the darkness – the wind seems to increase and the seas seem to build.
We have prepared our “ditch”
bag, which consists of our important papers, flares and other safety
items. A “ditch” bag means precisely
that…in the event we need to abandon ship we throw that in our life raft (which
is already fitted with emergency food, water, etc.). We also have an emergency beacon that we
would set off, which would be able to pinpoint our location. Hopefully this is all equipment that we will
never need.
We will be doing 4 hour
watches between Peter and I during the 12 dark hours. I’m still a nervous “crossing” sailor, so
Peter stays in the cockpit and sleeps while I’m on watch. I tend to wake him up
more often than I should if something doesn’t “feel right”. He then “cat-naps” during his watch, (while I’m
on high-alert during mine) which makes me nervous, so neither of us really gets
a decent sleep. We’ll make up for it when
we hit landfall.
What is interesting about
this crossing is we are leaving about 24 hours before 27 Oyster Boats are
heading in the same direction on their round the world rally. Oyster boats start at about 3 million dollars
and are very fast, so most of them will beat us to Vanautu. I feel somewhat more relaxed knowing there
will be that many boats close by, if anyone should run in to any problems. Peter still scoffs at my nervousness and all
he says is “they better not get in our way”.
As with all our crossings, I
will endeavour to do a blog posting every day.
This is dependent on whether we can get a ham radio connection, so if I
am unable to do so, please do not be concerned.
As we are going to the remote southern islands of Vanautu, we also won’t
be in regular email or internet contact for close to three weeks, but as soon
as I possibly can, I’ll update the blog with our safe arrival.
Hope you all had a wonderful
Canada Day weekend. We celebrated aboard
QuickStar.
Until tomorrow…….Stay safe
and have fun!
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