Fiji to NZ - Day 3 - 13 Nov - a little bit of everything

Bula!

You won't be seeing this Fijian greeting for a while, so I thought I would use it tonight :) Bula, Bula!

Day 3 has seen us continuing our steady progress towards NZ. Most of our weather has been dry & sunny, but we passed a band of rain this evening (just before dinner ... so we had cold seared tuna with cold fried rice after we were through it).

Victoria has been crocheting up a storm - she is working on a toy for some friends of ours, which she is designing as she goes. Johnathan read and played with Benjamin most of the day. As for Benjamin, he divides his time between telling us all the words he knows, playing on his motorbike in the cockpit, and nursing. Thankfully, we have Victoria and Johnathan to translate for us, because sometimes we need them (who else could know that "panka" was pencil??). He likes to go through all his words in categories, with one of us repeating each one as he says it: "taxi" "taxi"; "bus" "bus"; "tar" "car"; "tuck" "truck"; "helico" "helicopter"; "impy" "airplane"; "aggie" "Alex"; "bommie" "Brendan"; "Gecko" "Gecko" (Tim); "Di-aaaan" "Deanne"; "Gigi" "Gigi"; "Fampa" "Grandpa" etc, etc. As you can imagine, this is keeping us busy for longer and longer periods of time as he learns more words. Benjamin's other favourite activity is to draw on pieces of paper. A few weeks ago, Victoria and Johnathan began teaching him to make the letter "B" ("down-up-bump-bump"). Ever since, he has associated the letter B with drawing; we will hear an insistent little voice telling us "B-B-B-B" and we will know that he wants paper and a pencil. We have to react quickly so that he doesn't take whatever is nearest (eg a sharpie marker) and draw on whatever is closest (eg the cushions)!

We had a few periods of motoring through some squally areas throughout the evening/night. The winds have gone from 5 kts to 10-15 kts, and back again, several times. This has kept us on our toes, especially because Benjamin has been hard to settle the last two evenings. As soon as it is my turn to go on watch, it seems like he needs me, and he doesn't want to sleep on the port bench in the saloon. Last night, we lived with some noise (Max/Johnathan on watch trying to entertain him while I was off-watch attempting to sleep). Tonight, we thought we were ahead of the game when he went to sleep at 9pm (early for him) and I was slated for the first evening watch, but when he woke at 11pm, just as Max was going to sleep, Benjamin wouldn't settle, so we ended up switching on the fly: he took the early night, I took the mid-night, and Debbie has just come on for the (slightly early due to Benjamin stirring just as the wind picked up ...) end-of-night. So it goes. The sun will be up soon, and we will be on to another day :)

When the GRIBs didn't match our conditions this evening (forecast was for 13 kts and we were motoring in 4 kts), Max sent for an update from our weather guru, Bob McDavitt. We have already received up-to-date routing that agrees with the conclusions that he was beginning to form from this end. It is nice to have the technology to do this on passage: low-bandwidth and high speed (SSB radio, laptop, and human beings)!

Love to everyone,
Elizabeth
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At 11/13/2015 12:50 PM (utc) SV Fluenta was 23°26.63'S 173°13.65'E
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At 11/13/2015 7:47 PM (utc) SV Fluenta was 24°03.63'S 173°09.14'E

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