A Damp Night

It rained quite heavily during the night. Unfortunately, Denise thought I had closed the for'ard hatch and she thought I had! At 3am we woke and went on deck to check things out only to find ,to our utter dismay, the hatch wide open!! The next hour was spent hauling out wet cans and bags of food from the large storage area under the bunk and drying out the bilges. The good news is no serious damage was done.

We upped anchor at 8.45am this morning, retraced our steps out of the bay and headed for Nasonisoni Passage, which is a 2 mile long very narrow path through the coral reef with swirling turbulent waters. It is the sort of place you hope your engine won't fail! Once through the passage, we hoisted the big red reacher sail. Again we had light winds of 8 to 12 knots. Denise was at the helm on this stretch and beaming gleefully as we overhauled an American keeler. We had to navigate through a few more submerged and dodgy reefs before anchoring just past Coconut Point at N. Thank goodness for GPS waypoints!

We have now thoroughly dried out and are relaxing over a beer and breadfruit chips celebrating another successful day. We are off to Viti Levu tomorrow.

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