[password]shipnavire1
[status]
:position 06 39.530s 177 09.524

It's dawn and my six hour night watch is nearly over. My bunk is looking very appealing.
We are out in the ocean north of Tuvalu, six degrees south of the equator. I'm sending this email via single side band radio. I haven't had my gmail email for ages. Its all satellite up here and very slow and unreliable, and expensive.
I gaze out at an empty empty sea. There's not much traffic out here. David saw fishing boats last night. In Tuvalu, our last stop we saw 16 large Asian fishing trawlers. Normally there are very few yachts up here but currently there are six behind us and five ahead of us. Its fabulous traveling in a convoy. We have set up a daily radio net and check in to see where everyone is.

We left Fiji at the end of October to get north of the hurricane season which started in November. On our way we picked up a wonderful Fijian Tuvaluan man who wanted to sail on the open ocean to the land where he was born before he died. The two weeks he was with us was quite a treat, he taught us about the sea and sky. We planned to spend just a few days in Tuvalu and continue north to get to safer latitudes but spent three weeks there. First of all Kailopa got us involved in local things, then we formed the yacht fleet and enjoyed the social time that came with it. Then a tropical depression formed near here (it later turned into a cyclone) and we had to take 'shelter'. We anchored behind an island that was only a metre high (and with coconut palms), all the land is only that high up here, no wonder they are concerned with rising sea-levels, and behind a reef. We still got 50 knots of wind but the reef took the brunt of the seas. Pretty uncomfortable and a bit scary. The yacht next to us had their dinghy flip, drowning the outboard motor (we'd shipped ours before the wind came up), then at dawn I saw them dragging towards us. I radioed them and they had started their engine to move away from us but got a rope around their prop rendering their engine useless. Fortunately they just slid past us then their anchor caught on a coral bombie. No one got much sleep that night.

I just checked the horizons and there are squalls around us. They can hit with a lot of wind and bring rain too.

Now we head 250 miles, two days travel, to a very rarely visited northernmost island of Tuvalu, Nanumea. You have to jump through a whole lot of hoops to get permission to visit it after you have cleared customs and immigration, and they don't always say yes. One of the yachts is there already and said the locals are delighted to have us visit.

Then on to Kiribati on the equator. We'll probably have Christmas there at a remote island with a few other yachts and hopefully do something in the village too. There are a couple of foodies in the fleet and we are planning the menu and days events already. The Americans (we have yachts from US, Sweden, France, Aus and us from NZ) know Secret Santa so we may do that.

Oh yes, we are probably coming back to NZ at the end of next season so I'll get to see you all in a year or so.

Cheers
Janet
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