There’s nothing quite like a neat and tidy boat; which after much
cleaning and chucking out Chimere now resembles.

Wednesday 25 September 2013 Port Vila, Efate In the end it took about 26 hours of continuous sailing to get us from Port Sandwich to Port Vila; not a long distance, but made at least twice as far by our need to tack into almost constant headwinds. Our arrival at the entrance to the harbour […]

Then 15 minutes ago, around 11:00pm, the wind died away again, with our speed sitting at around 1.5 knots – I’ve resisted the urge to turn the motor back on in the hope the wind will return sometime soon – a test of both patience and faith. Read more…

Some of you may remember the days when purchased groceries could be taken home in used cardboard boxes being discarded by the store? This was before the days of flimsy plastic and reusable grocery bags.
Read more…

Back on the water, progress was very slow around the east coast, and after about 2 hours we somehow came to the consensus that we should turn around and go back – along the north coast and down the west coast. There was also the thought in the back of my mind that we should be a bit conservative with the use of fuel, given that it’s now about 3 months since we tied up at the fuel wharf and are on the last tank full. Read more…

Working our way down the west coast of Pentecost ended up taking a bit longer than we’d expected. We got away early, around 4:30am, but found progress a bit slow, with a few tacks necessary into the SE wind. Then we adopted a new strategy – get close enough to shore almost to anchor, then use the calm seas to basically drive south, making sure to stay in deep water. Read more…

After a cup of coffee it was time to get the dinghy over the side and into the beach. Today was a special day being the 100 day remembrance of Chief Nelson; something of a legend in this region and relatively old at 76 when he passed away about 3 months ago. There was a big crowd near the beach
and lots of activity. Read more…

On arrival, we wandered up to the hospital after asking a few people if anyone had any bananas. We are keen to get hold of some bananas! They seem to be in short supply. Read more…

We made it into town around 10:30 and managed to buy all the essential extra items we’d either run out of, or needed for new fish recipes we were keen to try on out 15kg catch from the other day. I may have said it was 10kg, but it’s now been a few days and some on board were sure it weighed a bit more than 10kg?! Read more…