Aradonna's blog

The lovely people in the village of Gasele adopted us into their family on Friday. There are about 35 houses in Gasele and another dozen or so in the next village. We joined in with their family reunion celebrations and they helped us celebrate the birthday of Heather's Mum and Niece. At the Kava party, Heather had her first ever drink of Kava. This is a root of the Yacona (pepper) tree, which is pound into a mash and squeezed into water. The drink tastes like muddy socks - or at least what you might imagine muddy socks to taste like - this has not been verified! There is a whole ceremony that goes with the kava drinking and the whole room shouted "Bula" for Mum's birthday when Heather had her first bowl of Kava. The neighbouring village also joined in the festivities and the chief took us to his house. The neighbouring village can only be reached by boat, or by crossing the "Mogili" bridge. Crossing the bridge was fun - it is straight out of Jungle Book! Trunks of coconut trees lie horizontally across the water, supported underneath by sticks coming up out of the water at opposing angles to form a V. Everything is lashed together with vines so that the tops of the upright supporting sticks come up past the horizontal trunk, to about waist height. More sticks are lashed horizontally between the upright V sticks to form a sort of handrail. It still requires a balancing act to cross it and the handrail is not really a support - it would give way if you put all your weight on it, so it is there just to guide and steady. Good fun! The feast itself was interesting. The men cooked the "lovo" which is like the hangi we have in NZ. Stones are cooked in a fire until hot, then placed in a pit in the ground. Root vegetables such as taro and cassava are placed in baskets woven from coconut leaves. Pieces of pork are wrapped in banana leaves. The food is placed in the pit with the hot stones, covered and cooked for a long time. Meanwhile the ladies in the village prepare yu mmy chicken dishes with onions and garlic and ginger and rosemary that they grow themselves. Karl gave pieces of chocolate to the children and quickly made many friends! The "lunch" we had been invited to lasted the whole day - we didn't need dinner. We were given fresh coconuts and breadfruit to take back to the boat and reminded several times to send best wishes from both villages to Mum for her birthday. A truly wonderful day. It is interesting to watch the children after school - they borrow one of the local boats, complete with 75hp outboard motors and zip around the bay. One boatload of kids stopped near us, threw a concrete block tied to a rope over the side as an anchor and all jumped in for a swim. Yesterday we went for a sail for several hours in a stiff breeze to try out the auto pilot (Raymond). He behaved well on both tacks, even with full sails up and heeling over considerably - so perhaps we have fixed him! It was also a good time to do some "hove-to" practice. During our sailing around we caught a rather large Mahimahi. Enough for 6 nights worth of meals! Dinner was Coconut battered fish and breadfruit chips. We ate like little piglets! Now at Ono Island, have been snorkeling amongst pretty coral and starting to prepare for our return to NZ. A few passage meals now in the freezer and some maintenance jobs done, plus a "to-do list" of other little items that will need our attention in the next couple of weeks before we head back to NZ.

The island of Kadavu is south of the main island of Fiji and if you keep heading south, this is the last major lump of land on the chart before NZ. Becasue of this, the locals call Kadavu, "little NZ" or "New Zealand Lai lai". The island is covered in lush green tropical rain forest and has some unique bird life, found only in Kadavu. They have their own Kadavu fantail, Kadavu honeyeater, Kadavu musk parrot and the velvet fruit dove. Sitting in the bay, the jungle-like bird calls can be heard from time to time - a pretty sound. The Namalata reefs on the northern side of Kadavu are fabulous dive spots and we have had a couple of wonderful dives. Visibility of more than 25m. On one dive we were treated to vast walls of coral, sporting many bright yellow corals. The next dive was a kaleidoscope of colourful soft corals. Brilliant purple, pink, bright yellow, rich reds, deep red-browns - all softly swaying on the rock faces. Throngs of blue and yellow fusiliers, a wide variety of other fish and a turtle kept us entertained. So beautiful. We have also done a bit of walking, through the "town" of Vunisea, the village of Namalata and now the village of Gasele. In Vunisea there is a small hospital, post office, dept of agriculture and 55 houses. There is a small produce market in Vunisea and a few small "supermarkets" like tiny corner dairy/kiosk stores. Apart from locally grown items, like cabbage, papaya and pumpkins, they also sell NZ onions and carrots (Ohakune carrots). Vunisea also has a tiny airport, with a runway that stretches on the only bit of flat land, from the north shore to the south shore. The plane holds a capacity of 19 people, but usually less passengers and lands once per day. This is the way most tourists arrive into Kadavu, by plane from Nadi. From Vunisea, tourists then have to travel about an hour by local boat to one of the 4 resorts on Kadavu, or to one of the two resorts at Ono Island nearby. The drought broke on Sunday night, with a thunder storm. Our first thunderstorm in the whole trip since leaving NZ. This is the first rain here for a couple of months. Since then we have seen misty rain hanging in the tops of the mountains each day, but hardly anything that reaches sea level. Over the last couple of days we have also been trying to fix our Automatic Pilot (we call him Raymond). He started misbehaving a few weeks ago and has been getting worse and worse - especially under sail, though not too bad when motoring. Perhaps he doesn't like heeling over? We think we have followed the instructions correctly to bleed air out of the system and hopefully that works. Yesterday we motor sailed from Namalata bay to Gasele bay and Raymond was working well, so fingers crossed. We will try him out on a more challenging sail tomorrow. Today we did sevusevu in Gasele village, about 64 people live here. There is no cell phone coverage in the village, so we asked for advice on where to find signal so we call Heather's Mum in NZ for her Birthday. They advised us to go out of the bay into open sea to find a signal, which we did - just two bars in a very small spot in the middle of watery nowhere! The locals are having a "lovo" feast today to celebrate a family reunion. When they heard it was Mum's Birthday they said we must join them for the feast and the whole village will celebrate Mum's Birthday too!

We loved having our visitors, Pieter and Sarah, come and stay with us for 10 days. They were great company and we had enough time (just) to get to the top of the Yasawas and back again, and see the highlights along the way. Heather, who loves getting creative with cooking, especially appreciated the inspiring meals whipped up by Sarah. More recipes have been jotted down in the "Aradonna Cookbook". After we waved them goodbye, we had every intention of heading back up to the Yasawas again for a more leisurely look. But having done the trip up and down twice now, we decided instead, to explore some new areas of Fiji. Realising that we might be away from "facilities" for a while we headed back into Nadi for some more provisions, did the last of the laundry and topped up the water tanks again before leaving Denarau just before the marina check out time of midday on Friday. As we had left our departure a little later than planned, we decided only to go as far as Momi Bay that afternoon. M omi Bay is on the western side of Vitu Levu and is the last bay as you head south before you have to get out of the "outer reef" system. Most of Fiji's 333 islands are on a large plateau, in relatively shallow water, surrounded by an outer reef. While the reef is not continuous, it does form a kind of barrier around the outside of the island group. In many places, like at Momi Bay, there are only small gaps in the reef. To venture south of Momi Bay we had to head out of this "outer reef" into deep blue water again. We left Momi Bay at 8.30am on Saturday, sure we would have enough time to head south down the western side of Vitu Levu and around the southern side to a sheltered bay. We were off to a great start as the tide was going out. As we headed between the gap in the reef we got a 1.4 knot push from the tide helping us along. The only problem was, there was no wind. We motored for 4 hours in glassy conditions before the wind came up. Then, our friend the wind decided to play tri cks on us again and was straight on the nose. We seem to have had this problem for the last few weeks - no matter which way we decide to head, the wind is going in the opposite direction! The waves got up with the wind and beating in to the waves slowed down our progress. Eventually we made it to Somosomo Bay in fading light at almost 5pm. Not ideal, but thankfully we still had enough visibility to get through the reef and into the bay. Being on the southern side of Viti Levu was like being in another world. Here the vegetation is lush and green and thriving. A stark contrast to the crisp, brown, bare hills of the northern side. This morning we decided to leave extra early for the 50 N mile crossing, South, to Kadavu, just in case the going was slow again. At 6am and still half asleep, the search for coffee revealed many soggy packets of provisions in the food locker. It seems we had been a little over enthusiastic about getting the water tanks really full and managed to overflow th em into the food locker! Out came packets of coffee, meusli bars, nuts, noodles, milk powder and crackers, forming soggy haphazard piles on the table and the seats. The inside of the boat looked like a corner dairy hit by a storm! We managed to mop up, giggle our way through a quick breakfast and then head out of the bay before 7am. At first it looked like there was no wind again, but to our delight, we had only just motored out of the bay when a whisper of a breeze came up - and it was in the right direction! The sails were up in no time and with smiles on our faces we had a wonderful sail in the sunshine. The island of Kadavu is not on the same plateau as the rest of the Fiji group, so once again we were sailing across deep blue water, over 2000 meters deep. This was the first time we had been really "at sea" since arriving in Fiji. The wind behaved itself for once, strengthening to a light but steady breeze, from the right direction - all day! We made 49 N miles in just 7 hours - a great average of 7 knots. In fact, we were going so well under sail it almost seemed a shame to bring the sails in when it was time to enter the harbour of Namalata Bay. We arrived in plenty of time for a snorkel - with loads of colourful soft coral, hard coral and fish to be seen. Some stunning blue coral caught our eye, standing out from all the rest! Thankfully, Heather was also able to wash her salty, windblown "haystack" and turn it in to something resembling hair again. Life is good!

After visiting the top of the Yasawas and enjoying stunning white beaches, we headed back south again, doing a couple of big day-hops. On Sunday during our voyage south, Pieter landed two Barracuda. The first one was 70 cm and the second one was about twice that size! We got to Manta ray channel in time for another drift snorkel and all enjoyed the spectacular seam of purple coral and colourful reef fish. We agreed it had to be the prettiest snorkel of any place we had been (apart from Wallis). We anchored nest to a rather large cat - in fact the largest sailing cat in the world, called "Hemisphere". She is 44.2m long and very impressive - her tender was lying on the other side of us in the bay and looked to be almost the same size as our boat. If you want to find out more about here have a look at www.sy-hemisphere.com she is quite a vessel. In the second big day-hop on Monday, Karl landed two Tuna, which gave us all a superb meal of tuna steaks on Monday night and another fine feas t of Kokoda on Tuesday night! The wind steadily increased as the day wore on and we gave Pieter and Sarah a taste of 'wet-n-wild sailing' with plenty of spray to keep us cool. We had intended to stop at Musket Cove for the night on Monday but the wind was howling in and the bay was chocka-block full of boats. After a hair-raising passage between dozens of anchored boats with strong winds pushing us around, we escaped and anchored in Liku Liku Bay which was tranquil and surprisingly quiet with only two other boats in the bay. We had a lazy day on Tuesday, swimming reading and content to stay put while the wind blew outside the bay. The resort in the bay is an exclusive 5 1/2 star one - guests pay $2800 per night to stay there! We watched several helicopters and sea planes landing and taking off to deliver and pick up their guests who obviously have cash to splash. We all felt rather lucky to be anchored in this bay as it didn't cost us any more than any other bay (nothing) and we had the same view and the same water! Yesterday we arrived at Denarau and had a lovely farewell meal with Pieter and Sarah at Amalfi's restaurant. On the same pier there is a vessel called DragonFly. She is a 230ft motor boat, owned by a Doctor. They sometimes have a team of doctors and nurses on board and visit some of the remote islands - sort of like a floating health clinic, but not in any official capacity. We had some bags of reading glasses left so we gave them to DragonFly to distribute to those who need them most. Today we waved goodbye to our friends as they flew back to NZ and then took the bus to Nadi to stock up on fresh produce again from the market. A $1 bus ride gets us into town and the local produce is very good value (as opposed to the tourist trap of Denarau where everything is so expensive). So now we have filled up with water again, got the laundry up to date and we are ready to explore some more of Fiji. If the wind cooperates we will begin our way south in the m orning, en route to Kadavu Is, which is below Suva on the southern coast of Viti Levu.