Day 10 - Entering the Koro Sea

Hello!

We have just past the first Fijian island marking the entrance into the Koro Sea. This gives us about 150 nm to go before we will be tied up in Savusavu.

The big question today was how many eggs, sweet potatoes, apples, carrots, etc we could eat in two days. I provisioned to have a comfortable stop in Minerva reef (ie a week of yummy at-anchor food) but instead we have been on passage for almost two weeks, so we have a generous amount of fresh produce left.

The result was scrambled eggs, fried eggs, and french toast (made with the last of Victoria's yummy cinnamon bread) for lunch and fried sweet potatoes (sort of sweet potato fries, but not really...) with pulled pork & carrot sticks for dinner, followed by apple crisp for dessert. Who says that passage food has to be boring! At one point, there were three people working comfortably in the galley. Kudos to Jesus who sliced several huge sweet potatoes into sticks while I had my off-watch nap.

The seas continued to be big & rolly, typical of 20 kts of wind. Thankfully we were mostly on a broad reach again, so the waves were generally approaching from behind. We had some good rolls this evening, though when the wind shifted forward and we had more like 100 deg apparent wind (almost a beam reach). Funny that beam reaching is such fun in the harbour where it is flat, but it is so nasty here with any sea state.

Anyway, this note is being written in the moments before going off-watch. With tweaking the course every few minutes to avoid shoals & islands, it wasn't the night to be popping up and down from the chart table! [for the sailors on the list, you may be interested to know that we do not rely on GPS solely for going around islands and dodging reefs especially in areas like this where the chart datums are usually off. Ideally we would do the navigation for these parts in daylight but the speed/time/distance for this part of the passage does not make that practical so we use our radar to get, at a minimum, line of position to give us a clearing bearing or a safe distance off. In this case I can see two islands on the radar so by taking the two ranges I can get a reasonable fix to keep us away from the reef that of course doe not show up on radar. Max] Max has just taken over in the cockpit, and it is time to sleep!

Love to all,
Elizabeth
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At 5/26/2015 3:23 PM (utc) SV Fluenta was 18°59.00'S 179°38.00'W

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