September 25, 2008
We remained anchored at Baie de Doking on Lifou Island (Loyalty Islands). It is very comfortable here and we are in no rush to begin a difficult upwind passage to Ile de Pines. The wind is forecast to back around to the northeast on Sunday and Monday. That makes our current location less comfortable and safe but also makes a move to the east-southeast much easier. So we will head for Ile de Pines or perhaps Mare, the easternmost Loyalty Island, when that wind shift occurs.
All the other ICA boats are now gone, including our friends on Tackless II. However, Dandelion and Exocet are here. Dandelion is a South African-built Leopard catamaran with a South African family who we first met in Fiji. Their youngest daughter Fern, who is 7, took very ill the morning after they arrived here (Monday) and was sent to Noumea in an air ambulance with her father, Roger. Her mother Sharon and older sister Storm (11 years old) remain on the boat. Fern had emergency surgery to remove an intestinal obstruction. She is doing well and she and her father may return tomorrow or Saturday. Exocet is a beautiful and very fast French-built Outremer catamaran built as a racer/cruiser and sailed by Luis and Natalya, a young couple from Colombia. We made friends with them in Ambrym (Vanuatu) and saw them in a few other places in Vanuatu. We went snorkeling with them yesterday but could hardly keep up. They dive 25 feet under the surface and just hang out there for a few minutes before they need to come up for air. We saw a huge squid and two sharks, among other things. Luis spears fresh fish or octopus for dinner every day. We ate on Exocet last night, and had fresh poisson cru and ceviche, along with Laura’s famous meatballs from Shirley’s recipe. At the end of the evening, they begged for the recipe.
The coral in this bay is very nice and the water is especially clear. We are less than 200 miles south of Port Vila but the climate is very different. The temperature falls into the mid-60s at night, so we sleep with two blankets and wear sweaters and long pants in the evening, and it only gets into the mid-70s during the day. The water is quite cool – if you jump in wearing just a bathing suit you need to get out after 15 minutes. We wear full body wetsuits of 3 mm neoprene to snorkel, as do the others. The added buoyancy makes it difficult to dive under the surface without wearing dive weights.
Lifou is a raised coral island about the same size as Tahiti, but with only 10,000 inhabitants. The shore is a very steep cliff of ancient coral. There is no beach and no good place to tie a dinghy. Getting ashore involves using both a dinghy anchor and a line tied to a rock ashore. Then one has to ascend about 200 steps to the plateau on which the small village sits. The cliffs have been eroded into a pattern of deep caves with stalagmites and stalactites visible from the water. It is a beautiful setting.
Repair issues continue to be a bother. On Sunday evening, our watermaker started spraying salt water all over the engine room and I had to shut it down. I hoped that it might just be a loose connection but soon found out that it was more serious. In order to diagnose the problem and affect a repair, I had to unbolt the whole apparatus containing the pressure tubes from the engine room bulkhead and ceiling and bring it on deck. To do that, I had to remove duct work and piping in order to get access to the bolts. With Laura’s help, I took it apart and found that the high-pressure fittings at one end had corroded. Fortunately, I had a set of new fittings that I had ordered from France 3 years ago and kept as spares. It took all day to remove the old fittings, re-assemble the pressure apparatus, and then put everything back together in a very difficult to access corner of the engine room. If I was 5 feet 2 inches tall, 100 pounds, quite strong, and had nimble fingers, the re-installation would have been a lot easier. But I am none of those, and am still sore and bruised from my efforts. The watermaker now works perfectly, and without leaking a drop.
The village here has only the tiniest store. Yvette, a friendly older Kanak woman, runs the store and lives next door with her husband Pierre. If she is not in the store, which is much of the time, you just ring the cow bell in front and she soon appears from the house. The only fresh food in the store are onions and garlic, plus delicious bread. One afternoon after the bread truck delivered, people from the village waited impatiently for Yvette to open the store but she did not appear even after many rings of the cow bell. So someone took a screwdriver, removed the lock hasp, and opened the door. Everyone took bread and left their 200 francs on the counter, then screwed the hasp back in place and returned the lock.
We needed more food than this little store could provide plus we desperately needed to get more French Polynesian francs. The only francs we had were the small starter amount we bought in Vanuatu. There is no foreign exchange service in Ouvea, our first stop in the Loyalty Islands. So on Tuesday, we arranged for Pierre to take us and Don from Tackless II to the capitol city of We on the other side of the island in his cute little Renault truck. He took us to the bank, a Thai restaurant for lunch, the combination fruit/vegetable market and bingo parlor, and the small supermarket. There was not much local produce as it was not a regular market day – we could not even get bananas – but were able to load up on tomatoes, lettuce, bok choy, papaya, and imported apples. Pierre has arranged for some bananas to be available for us at the local store today.
M.