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September 26, 2022

day 135: is samsung best known for their vacuums?

Miriam: The sunset is muted peach through layers of grey clouds on the horizon. We are anchored at Dravuni Island in front of the beachfront village, a very well kept collection of sturdy wooden houses painted bright colours. The children just went in from playing and laughing on the beach. Jamie is cooking a massive cassava root for dinner which was a gift from Kao, the lovely man who met us on the beach on our way back from sevu sevu and took us to his cassava patch to harvest us a few of the huge tubers as a welcome gift. Tomorrow we are to visit his sky blue house to rest on his veranda before hiking the hill to the highest point of the island. This island personifies tropical paradise with it’s long sandy beach fringed with coconut palms surrounded by teal waters as the light refracts off the shallow sandy bottom. We had to anchor twice as the deputy of the chief informed us our first anchorage was too far away from the village and as we were part of their village after sevu sevu we needed to be closer so they could make sure we were safe. Though we may have just been in the way of the fishing boats as they left and returned. I am looking forward to a few days exploring the islands under this village’s jurisdiction; in addition to this one there are a few uninhabited ones near by. I’ll leave the rest of today to others to story (though I will take credit for being the first to notice the smell of burning rubber) and will sign off with the taste of a papaya as big as my head, bought from the kiddos at Kadavu, mild, sweet, absolutely delicious.

Robin: a dramatic morning started with us blowing the starter motor in pouring rain, re-anchoring in matasawalevu with burning rubber smoke billowing, and trouble shooting. With very little knowledge of engines or really much of anything pertinent to our situation, I made myself somewhat useful by repeatedly refreshing the Iridium software, calling satellites to beam out updates to my aunt Jennie and receive her replies. After being a loyal fan of Bluebirds blog and being in email communications before coming aboard, let me tell you loyal fans: pecking out messages on this iPad and waiting for the system to AUTHENTICATE and NEGOTIATE and whatever else it does is no joke! Our new anchorage has service and we are all slurping up internet shamelessly. Sail over here was absolutely gorgeous, I’ll let others tell the tale of successfully righting the wrongs of the motor and windlass, but we were all relieved to be sailing away when it was over and the weather turned lovely to boot. I steered most of the way which I quite love to do as it gives me an important job and the other crew bring me drinks and snacks. We reached Dravuni, a poster island for tropical paradise and went to shore to offer sevu sevu to the village chief. Unlike the last two villages where we had the ceremony inside a home on woven mats, this chief came to meet us outside and he and his right hand man performed the ceremonial phrases while we all sat around on the sandy grass. Now we are welcome to explore their island and surrounding islets hooray! On the way back I found some excellent shells including one that gave Naomi, resident shell discoveress supreme, a karmic dose of shell envy muahaha. Spotting Scorpio in the night sky now - thanks to Miriam I can reliably identify - and have high hopes that this will be the eve we finally play Codenames.

Hello it’s Naomi Well I blew the dang starter motor today which was one of those things where you leave the anchorage then you go oh no the motors smoking then you quickly turn it off and unfurl the jib and sail right back to the anchorage and drop the anchor real quick and go all right oh geeze let’s take everything apart. Anyway it turns out the breaker switch to the windlass somehow was able to be connected back up again, if you lay in Jamie’s palatial bed and click it back into place with your big toe, which is what he discovered this morning. This was very exciting for us, we didn’t have to lean all the way into the engine compartment to touch the two wires together. Unfortunately I had left the wires not totally connected as I figured we would be leaning back in there shortly to mess with them. I did not expect that the breaker switch would magically start working again. In any case it turns out that if you don’t have the windlass snugly set up with the wires tightly connected it will burn out the starter engine :) teehee. Luckily we had the old starter in the spare engine parts box and Jamie and I set to work on swapping them over, it took some time to figure out the right configuration to get the tools in the tight spaces of the engine to replace it. And then we had the unmistakeable joy of turning the ignition key and having the engine start right up !!! Followed by immediate frustration of the anchor rope yet again getting caught in the windlass ? As we were raising it. This is very unusual and also annoying because yet again we had to take apart the gypsy to un-jam it. I’m still unsure as to why this is happening but I sure hope it doesn’t happen again. Fiiinally two hours after we initially departed, we re-departed the anchorage again. In sunny skies this time and perfect sailing conditions, 14-16 knots, flat calm water inside the lagoon, wind on the beam. We kept a good eye out for reefs and didn’t hit anything ! The only other bad thing we did today was anchor too far away from the village :( and when we got to the village Bula told us we were too far away and needed to move closer and he was very serious about it and other people we talked to agreed with him, so we did. In very low light but we forced robin to get in the water to see what we were anchoring on so we found a little sandy patch for the anchor ! Later robin held us as a captive audience in the dinghy, standing on the swim step so we were unable to disembark from the dinghy, as she proudly tied a bowline for us all to see. The bunny almost took a wrong turn but luckily she got it before too long and we finally were able to board the boat.

Jamie: I’m very proud of our problem solving this morning. As a team we once again overcame adversity and challenge in a fun and engaging way. The engine and windlass stopped working and we made them start working again. Tonight I made a fatty meal with butter and duck fat and milk and it was glorious. It will set us up for a good slumber. Miriam is learning to play codenames and the cousins are fighting and deciding they’re maybe really not each other’s favourite cousins anymore… Apparently there are a few snakes here. I love snakes and am really hoping we see some tomorrow on our walk. Today when we left the anchorage after about 15 minutes we were just passing the passage which we snorkelled yesterday. The rod went buzz and I leapt to the rod. We slowed the boat and I got this fish up pretty close! It was about 15m away and it was the shape of a mahi-mahi. But it was silver and had a yellow tail! It got off just before we got it closer! Argh ! WOD: Bottom. Bottom - the opposite of top U.I.a.s: “would you like some papaya today?“ “No sorry we already bottom.”

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