Cyndi and Rich aboard Legacy
August 10, 2018
or, How We Spend Our Days in Suva
Morning coffee in the cockpit…
Morning work…
Lunch… (Fatburger!)
Movie…
Shopping…
That’s coming to an end for a while at least as we’re heading about 40 miles south to the islands around Kadavu, but we’ll be back in Suva in a few weeks and pick up our routine where we left off. -Rich
August 9, 2018
The LCD screen broke on our 7 year old, amazing, trusty laptop computer yesterday. Well, actually I broke it while trying to fix the broken hinge on the lid. There’s no hope of getting a replacement LCD, especially here in Suva, Fiji. Fortunately, my brilliant, charming and beautiful wife and partner came up with a fix: buy a computer monitor and just use that as a display. Here it is…
I sawed off the screen and now it’s a desktop computer. No muss and fuss finding a suitable replacement laptop. No week long hassle of reinstalling programs and configuring them to work the way we want. No Windows 10 and it’s endless nagging about updates!!!
Cruising requires flexibility. And, oh yea, a brilliant partner helps too!
Now we just need to figure out how to mount it so it will remain in place while underway. I’ll get Cyndi right on that challenge! -Rich
Wakaya’s low, dry hills and long white beach are a contrast to lush and mountainous eastern Fiji but would be right at home in western Fiji. There’s a very exclusive resort here; so going ashore is definitely not allowed. The resort is covered by palm trees, and the area is nice looking except for a really hideous house on the headland in the bay, proving that while money can’t buy taste, it can buy off architects.
Update 2018: It seems the resort has managed to get Homestead Bay, the anchorage here, deemed a protected marine area. (How they did this for a mostly sand bottom with only scattered small coral areas we don’t know, but we suspect bribe money changed hands.) Not aware of the new developments, we anchored here and were promptly visited by a resort employee who told us it’s illegal to anchor anywhere in the lagoon. The only option is to use the large can mooring we’d noticed as we came towards the bay. It’s out away from the island and fairly exposed to the elements. Furthermore, if the wind dropped, a sailing yacht would likely end up banging against the can. With this, we decided to leave, but what a load of baloney this whole thing is. The resort has never been yachtie friendly, and now they’ve taken away one of our anchorages. We intend to protest this however we can.
There are dive sites here, including a manta area, but it seems the only way to see them now is to get on a dive boat out of Levuka (and I’m not sure there is such a thing) or a liveaboard cruise out of Suva. Otherwise, if you have a good dinghy, your own equipment, and knowledge as to where the sites are, and you happen to find the mooring can free, you may be able to do it yourself.
July 23, 2018
I am really, really pleased with our new navigation tools. They include Simrad EVO3 chartplotters which can display satellite images and forward scan sonar. Here’s what it enabled us to do…
Here’s all that Navionics charts showed us…
Because of their shallower draft, we usually see catamarans anchored inside where we anchor. Not the case here. This is as close as these two catamarans dared…
We’ve been using satellite images to navigate for about five years, loading them on our phones and iPad. It’s so much better having them on our chartplotter as we enter areas like these. The forward scan sonar tells us just how deep the dark patches in front of us are. Can we go over it or do we need to turn? Now we know.
And the next morning, we woke up to the payoff…
Matei, Fiji[/caption]
Yep, that’s our anchor chain. -Rich
July 16, 2018
After only 10 days in Savusavu, we hit the road this afternoon. We made the grueling 3 mile trip to anchor off of the Cousteau resort. Tomorrow, we’ll head east.
Cyndi got this wonderful photo from the cockpit this evening. (Is Venus going to hit the moon? Has anyone heard anything about this?)
