Taveuni and back to Savusavu (20th June 2018
Mustang Sally Cruising
Mark Lawrence & Dianne Jackson
Tue 19 Jun 2018 20:51
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After a bit of a rolly
night on the NW anchorage of Taveuni we moved up to the anchorage at the
northern tip which is well protected by reefs and provided a very comfortable
spot to stop for a few days. This is also much closer to kite point where
we are definitely hoping to get some kiting in especially as it was recommended
to us by Steph at SHQ, where we bought our kite boarding gear, and Paul who runs
the kiting lodge up here.
Again it is a very
pretty spot to stop with a couple of tree covered islands a bit upwind of us and
some very nice reefs to snorkel on not too far from the boat. We were also
lucky enough to have a pod of spinner dolphins do a swim by the yacht most
mornings and even had a manta ray doing belly flops at the back of the boat one
evening while we were enjoying sun downers...
 The weather didn’t disappoint and we had good trade
wind conditions during our stay – the only issue is that there is only dinghy
access at around 3 hours either side of the high tide which happened to be early
morning but we managed to work around that and had three mornings of excellent
kiting and also had some kiting company from some fellow cruisers who joined us
in the anchorage. We also had our neighbours demonstrating various new
kiting things for us to try.
 
Our neighbour showing us some moves to work on !!!!
Demonstrating a boat launch – more work required
We have a visitor arriving on the 21st June so we
have been debating for the last week on the best spot to pick him up. There is
an airport at both Taveuni and at Savusavu but with a bit of funny weather on
the cards and only limited seats available on flights we decided it was best to
arrange to meet Mal at Savusavu. We would have loved to show him Taveuni
as it is a very lovely part of Fiji with some beautiful scenery and some great
snorkelling but was not to be the case but sure we will find plenty of
interesting spots to show him once he is on board on Thursday.
On the 18th it is time to leave the anchorage and
start our trek into Savusavu – first stop is back down to Paradise Resort which
is a 20NM trip which takes us back through the Somosomo Strait and through
the black hole of the Taveuni Triangle where most of our navigational tools seem
to go on the fritz and back into the eastern hemisphere – Mark had to take a
photo of that as we missed it on the way up.
Crossing the 180o meridian back into the Eastern
Hemisphere
The World Arc Rally is in town so when we arrived
at Paradise it was looking pretty busy but we did manage to get a mooring and,
as is the case in this part of the world, had a boat come out to greet us and
help us get our lines on to the mooring – we will definitely miss this type of
service when we get back to Australia. We were also very appreciative of
the assistance as we recently broke our boat hook which was going to make things
a bit difficult in the mooring department without a hand.
Yesterday it was up early for the 45NM trip back
into Savusavu (our current position is 16:46.64S
179:20.08E.
Luckily we booked a berth a week ago as there are
also plenty of ARC boats in here too. Upon arrival we went and met Preeti, who
runs the marina office, to do our check in. We then had to head to Baobab to
pick up our new diesel lift pump which we are keeping as a spare after our
starter motor issue a few weeks ago and then onto the Yacht Shop who has been
holding onto a new extendable boat hook for us to replace the one that I
broke. The only bits we are still missing as some kite repair gear that we
ordered from the states a few weeks ago but Preeti is onto the case so hopefully
they will turn up soon – fingers and toes crossed.
We had a very yummy dinner off the boat last night
at the marina restaurant and Mark is currently working on the generator as it is
due for its 100 hourly service plus it has been leaking a bit of diesel so a bit
of detective work is also being done although he seems to have found the issue
with a leaky bleed screw so all seems to be good in the world although we can
neither confirm of deny this until he puts it all back together
again.
Brain surgery underway
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