Happy Labor Day to all our friends and family state side. Hope you enjoyed your day off work.
So Sunday ended up being a busy boat chore day. My big project was changing the watermaker filters and rearranging the anchor locker so it would absorb the rest of the stuff in what will be Paul's bunk. Changing the water maker filters is one of those dreaded projects. There are two filters - 20 and 5 microns, and a strainer. The 20 micron prefilter is actually pretty easy - it is under the sink in the forward head. So, no problem there. The other two, not so easy. They require everything in the aft section of the anchor locker to be removed. The strainer is all the way at the bottom. Visualize head down, ass up for real. Got them taken care of without too much cursing under my breath. Somehow or other I managed to shoe horn everything back in plus several other items. Stowing in a boat is like doing one big jigsaw puzzle. The only things left in Paul's bunk to stow some other place were my bike, 3 packages of toilet paper, the popcorn pan, snacks and the paper charts. Not bad. Dennis spent most of the day trying to get the stupid router to work - never happened. I was pooped, and hit the hay at 8pm!!!
Yesterday (Monday for us) was no holiday on Evergreen. There was homework to be done, stowing and sorting, laundry to be gathered to take in, letters to pick up and immigration to visit - a full day. We started the day with coffee and breakfast at the dock while our letter saying we are, for real moored here in SavuSavu, was being prepared. So, coffee here is actually espresso - no drip, and they tend to bring it with the meal. Not that that particular deal worked for us as we left the boat uncaffeinated. Poor waitress - weird ass tourists. Breakfast (and the coffee served with warmed milk) was good. The letter was ready so it was off to immigration. The lady there looked at us like we were asking for the moon. She said she could get the letter ready, but there was noone there to sign it. I explained that Friday we were told to come back today and it would be no problem getting the letter. She told us to come back at 1500 - maybe someone would have come in by then..... Oh well, what do you do???? Smile and say Tanaka (thank you) , see you at 1500.
Did a little exploring of the east end of town. Found a great little store with lots of US foods and a large selection of beer/wine & liqour. We want to try some Fijian rum, just not sure which to try. Like Fr. Polynesia, liquour is quite expensive, at least here beer is cheap. Checked out the other laundry $4 a kilo, so put that on the afternoon list. Also went in the meat shop - prices are per kg, and pretty comparable to the US. Picked up some goat curry to try. From there we headed to the Vodafone kiosk where I left Dennis with my laptop and all the patience I could "beam" over to him. While he did that, I went to the atm, checked out several stores, bought buns for the hamburgers we were having for dinner and went in the market and got eggs. I got back to him just as he was finishing up. We ended up with a different product altogether - like a mobile hotspot type deal. Works great! Yay!!! Cost more, but I don't care, it is worth it to plug and play. From there back to the boat to wait for 1500.
Josh did homework, I started the watermaker - it made funny noises. That sucked. I had reused filters (supposed to be able to, and we have in the past) and I guess the water maker wanted none of that reuse/reduce/recylce crap. It wanted fresh filters. Well, I couldn't face it so decided to play Scarlett and worry about it tomorrow. Instead, rearranged the food lockers. Yikes! big job. Not sure how it happened, but there was mold growing on some cans and boxes of mac and cheese in the port locker. EEWWW! Out came the bleach, out came everything from that locker. Got it all sorted out and everything put away. It is tight, but works. By then it was 1500 - time to go get the letter. Josh wanted a shower - hopefully hot - at the marina, so he dropped Dennis and I and our laundry off at the Waitui marina and headed back to CopraShed for his shower. Dennis and i dropped off the laundry and yeehaw the letter was ready and signed. We were finished a lot faster than Josh can shower, so we went to the yacht club at the CopraShed for a beer.
Back at the boat I scanned and sent off Paul's letter. For our dining pleasure the evening's menu included hamburgers on the grill, salad and banana chips. Of course the banana chips are not straightforward to cook. So, I had to get going on those. Start with 3 plantains. Boil until skin turns brown, peel the skin off. Start oil heating on the stove. Slice the plantains very thinly - the thinner the better. i did some lengthwise and some crosswise. The crosswise were easier to make thin, so turned out the best. When the oil gets to 350 degrees, start cooking. If you can keep the oil that hot, the chips cook in 2-3 minutes. i had trouble keeping it at that temp, and being of the impatient variety, didn't wait for it to heat back up between batches, just pressed on. They turned out okay. Not as good as the ones we had at Tesa's in Am. Samoa - but not bad for the first attempt. After dinner we watched the latest Die Hard movie which was fun - shoot em up bang, bang!!! Bruce Willis sure has held up well huh?
Yay!! i managed to sleep until 0730 today. Nice. Didn't have all my coffee in though, when the Waitui marina person stopped by and told us we needed to mov.e from our mooring. Seems ours was a hurricane mooring and the boat that reserved it is arriving tomorrow. So 0930 found us in the dinghy scouting moorings. Finally decided on a Coprashed mooring. The Waitui mooring was too far out. 1030 found us settled on our new mooring - easy peesy. Gotta love it when the marina guy comes out in his dinghy and threads your lines through the mooring for you. He even put our shackle on the line for us. Nice, made Josh's job super easy.
Today i had to tackle the water maker filters. Oh yeah yesterday - no rain, today when I need to move the bike - back to rain, and forecast to last til Friday. We are going to turn into ducks......
So, the watermaker filters.... did I tell you how much I hate changing them? and what a PIA they are to change? I did, so I won't whine anymore. Got it done - is working fine. Next up was getting the bike out of Paul's bunk. The plan is to put it under the blue dinghy on deck until we leave Fiji. So, I carefully taped all around the lid. Went to take it out of the boat - wouldn't fit. I had forgotten that the case doesn't fit through the companionway. I didn't cry or kill anything, but I wanted to. Fortunately we tried taking it out with the lid off the case (before removing the bike) and that worked, so it wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be. But, did I mention it is raining??? Have you ever tried to apply tape in the rain? Not the best plan. So, my poor bike is sitting on deck in the rain - half taped. It may just have to go under the dinghy that way.
Good thing we live on a boat, cuz otherwise we would probably be working on an ark in our backyard. Just sayin' ya know?
The port bunk is empty!!!! The port bunk is clean, linen fresh, curtain hung, screen being fixed as we speak, lee cloth re done, wood oiled - totally unrecognizable as our spare bunk. oh yeah and Dennis even emptied a drawer. Both heads are clean and the rest of the boat got dusted and oiled. Only thing left to do is clean the kitchen, but that is a daily chore anyway. Never did go in for our laundry, but didn't see much point of paying to get it dried only to soak it again on the trip home. Had the curry we bought yesterday for dinner. Lots of bones = bad, very spicy = good. Will have to keep trying, cuz would love to put some of those packages in the freezer for easy crossing meals.
Tomorrow I am going to go look at our neighbor's genoa. The stitching on one of the upper horizontal seams gave out on their way here from Tonga. I will resew for them if I can fit the sail into my machine. I don't think I will be able to, but I promised I would look. Paul gets in tomorrow afternoon. We hope to get him settled and head out Friday or Saturday. As you know, that is all weather dependent... but hopefully. SavuSavu is nice, i really like it here, but again - can't get in the water. Not that it has been warm enough to even want to, but that's not the point.
More later
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