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!