Month: October 2015

October 11, 2015

Cyndi came up with this yesterday as we were enduring a steady 27 knots of wind, with gusts to 34 knots, during our 20 mile trip from Saweni Bay to Mololo Island!

What makes this all the worse is that it wasn’t forecast. Here’s what the GRIBs said we should have experienced.

Also, no one mentioned the northerlies that came Friday afternoon – blowing right into Saweni Bay and creating big, short, steep swells!

The wind is down a bit now, but it’s still blowing more than predicted. We’re hiding out at Likuliku, somewhat in the wind-shadow of Mololo Island.

That huge, tight low in the Windyty.com screenshot above is what’s supposed to be coming our way on Thursday.

It’s just like the Hunger Games:
What will they throw at us next, and where will it come from?!

-Rich

Update (and Answer)

It became a named storm: 02P Two and was only a hair away from becoming a cyclone. It went towards Vanuatu and never threatened Fiji, but there were lots of sailor’s eyes following it, including our four.

October 10, 2015

What a great outing we had… Sand Dunes, the Eco Park and a quick stop to check out the horseback riding at Natadola Beach. We didn’t ride, but we probably will. It’s a pretty beach and the horses look very well cared for. Oh yea, there’s also a resort hotel. -Rich

October 10, 2015

On our sand dunes trip in the south of Viti Levu, Fiji, we also went to the Kula Eco Park. Nice! It’s a little expensive (30 Fiji per person), but it goes to a good cause and I doubt they blow the cash on hookers and drugs!

Click on any picture to enlarge and then you can scroll through the images.

September 9, 2015

As we sit here anchored in Saweni Bay, bouncing around in an unexpected northerly, we remember another windy day last week: at the Sigatoka Sand Dunes (by now, you know that it’s pronounced Singatoka, right?).

Click any picture to enlarge and then you can scroll through all of them.

This is an amazing place and so worth the effort to make the 1-1/2 hour trip from Vuda Marina. Sam, the best cab driver ever (Fiji phone: 933 8387), took Bob and Linda from Bright Angel, Dean from Local Talent and the two of us on this outing. We also stopped at Kula Eco Park to visit with some of Fjij’s birds and lizards (more on that soon).

Here’s a little video of the dunes… -Rich

(This reminded me a lot of another sand dunes adventure – Te Paki Sand Stream in NZ.)

October 4, 2015

I wish I’d been more careful with my chartplotter tracks during the first part of this trip. I didn’t care much because I thought I’d never be back to the places we’d been, but I was wrong.

This is our third season in Fiji, we’ve been to Tonga twice, NZ twice and New Cal twice.

To state the obvious: traveling through reef-infested waters is so much easier when you’re traveling on a track you’ve already successfully navigated.

As you can see in the photo above, our chartplotter, like most, only stores so many track points before it starts eating the earlier points. Now, I regularly save tracks, backing them up on our computer. I wish I’d done this all along!

Come on marine manufacturers! Give us some memory. Even 1 GB of storage for routes, tracks and waypoints, with each point taking 10 bytes and recording a route point every five seconds, would last over 38 years of continuous running. 1 GB isn’t that much anymore. Cheapskates!

Until they come around, I’ll keep backing up tracks on my computer.

And speaking of tracks, routes, waypoints, and backups of the aforementioned…

I’ve been using the “layers” feature on openCPN to display my backed up tracks. In the route manager, click the layers tab. There’s a special temporary layer available. If you click on the “Temporary Layer” button, it’ll open a window asking you to select a GPX file (which just happens to be one of the formats our Simrad chartplotter will use to store its backed up data). OpenCPN will display that temporary layer data until the program is closed and reopened.

If you want to make that layer more permanent (as I’ve done with most of the layers in the photo above), store the layer’s GPX file in a folder called “Layers” in the openCPN data folder (C:\ProgramData\opencpn on my computer). Then it’ll be there every time you bring up openCPN. You can make the layer visible or not by clicking on the eye in the layers tab of the route manager.

A big advantage to doing it this way is that these routes can’t be accidentally changed – something I’m always doing. Once you’ve accidentally moved a waypoint, it’s hard to get it back to where it was as openCPN’s undo function doesn’t work so well. (There I go, complaining about an amazing, free program. Ingrate!)

Here’s openCPN’s layers instruction page.

-Rich