We left Ogea in the late morning on Monday, July 29. As we were leaving the very shallow bay, we touched a small coral head and bent the rudder back. We dropped anchor outside of the bay to inspect the rudder and decided to continue on. The steering was now stiff and hand steering was now our only option.
Rudder bent backwards
We motored for a couple of hours over to Vulaga and followed the tracks of RaLa and Womble into the tricky pass and over to the anchorage in front of the village. We all went to shore and walked to the village for sevusevu, the presentation of our bundles of kava root to the chief of the village. Ian and Laura on RaLa had already been to the village a few weeks before, so they introduced us to Mitchi, the head man and his wife Lenny. They were Ian and Laura’s host family and they soon became our host family. A man by the name of Tai became Dale and Katrina’s host family. Mitchi took us to the village chief for our presentation and checkin. We provided our boat papers for Mitchi to check and gave 50 Fijian dollars per boat. After that, we were officially welcomed into the village and onto the island to explore as we pleased. Mitchi is a master carver and I bought a carving from him with plans to return the next day for more.
The next day, we returned to the village. We bought a basket of fruits and vegetables and then went to Mitchi and Lenny’s house. We sat on a mat outside while Mitchi carved and his nephew talked to us about his life. Jeff and Ian went up to a lookout above the village and Laura and I stayed on the mat and had fresh coconut water. In our discussions, I learned that Mitchi needed sandpaper and his nephew needed rope, so I agreed that we would come back soon to bring those things. We were expecting a few days of strong winds, so Mitchi urged us not to rush back to the village.
The next day, Wednesday, all three boats went over to anchor in what is referred to as the lagoon, along with a host of other boats. It’s a pretty wide-open expanse with a sandspit in the middle. It’s very popular among kiteboarders and they were having a fun time because it was certainly windy enough. The anchorage was surrounded by small jungle-covered islands with nice beaches. Ian and Laura took Jeff and me on a walk around the island right in front of our boats. Later we had beers on the beach with Ian and Laura and Brad and Tari from Ndebt, whom we’d met in Ogea.
On Thursday, we returned to the village. RaLa took their boat over and we joined them, towing our dinghy. We gave the sandpaper and rope to Mitchi and his nephew and they gave us a big squash. Then I bought some onions and potatoes in the small village shop. After we returned to RaLa, they anchored near the pass with plans to sail out of the pass and north that day. And we took our dinghy back to Aldabra. Womble left the next day, also heading north.
On Friday, Jeff and I took the dinghy over to the pass to snorkel it. We started outside the pass, dragging the dinghy and let the current take us inside the pass. I struggled to keep the dinghy from being pushed by the wind into the reef on the other side of the pass. And there wasn’t anything spectacular to see in the pass that day. But we were glad to have had the adventure. We also used the handheld depth sounder to take depth readings on the way back, knowing that a friend would be coming into the pass in a couple of days and we planned to escort him in. On Saturday, I put on my dive gear and cleaned the parts of the boat bottom that we can’t reach by snorkeling. It was the first cleaning since leaving New Zealand, so it was good to get that done. Jeff worked on his list of projects. On Sunday, Thomas on Saoirse arrived at the end of the day and we escorted him through the pass. He had brought some important parts for me from New Zealand, so I was glad to unburden him of them – autopilot parts and new cabin fans.
On Monday, August 5, we took the dinghy over to the village to help Thomas check in. Mitchi and Lenny agreed to host Thomas because he was our friend. We first sat in on a town meeting, where a representative reported what had occurred at a meeting among all the Lau group islands. Then the chief did the sevusevu ceremony for Thomas and Tore and Maud on Song of the Sea. Next, we went to Mitchi and Lenny’s house and sat with them. Mitchi wove a hat for Jeff. Thomas talked with Mitchi about what carvings he wanted to buy.
Our hostess Lenny
Mitchi carving a turtle
Ian showing us the basket that Lenny has just woven for him
Jeff and his new hat
During all these days, it was really windy, so not much fun to explore by kayak or go swimming. The entertainment on Tuesday was a bonfire on the beach with the other boats in the anchorage. (The owner of one of the boats worked at Logitech at the same time as I did, but we didn’t know each other.) The excitement the next day was when the Fijian Navy came to board each boat to check our papers. They were very friendly.
On Thursday, we went back to the village to attend a fundraiser for the cricket team. It seems that a man came to the islands in this group several years ago and introduced them to cricket. So even though rugby is the popular sport throughout much of Fiji, Vulaga is one of the islands that is devoted to cricket. We watched the cricket match in the middle of the village. Then we joined the villagers in the community center for singing and pageantry and a lunch. Each of the boats that attended donated money to cricket the team so they could travel to another island for a tournament. They raised more than 1000 Fijian dollars, with maybe 700 coming from the yachties.
That night, we sat down with Tore on Song of the Sea and Thomas on Saoirse and made a plan to leave. Vulaga is a place you can stay for a long time if the weather is nice. But we were faced with several more days of wind.
The next day, August 9, we pulled our anchors up at around 9:30 a.m. and headed out of the pass and toward Matuku. There was a thought that we would sail all the way to Kadavu, but once underway, we realized the conditions would not allow us to get to Kadavu before nightfall the following day. So we sailed to Matuku.
It would be an understatement to call this a difficult passage. It started off okay. We had decent wind as we headed northwest, cutting through a pass between two islands. But as we left the protection of those islands, the seas started getting bigger and the wind shifted and dropped off. We altered course to go below the island of Totoya instead of above it. As we proceeded, the seas and the winds built. We were on a broad reach, always at risk of jibing as the waves pushed us from side to side. We were hand steering and it was very difficult to hold any kind of a course. At one point, Jeff was steering and he heard a clunk and then the steering went from being very stiff to very loose and unresponsive. He fought with the wheel for a couple of hours. Finally (and of course this is in the middle of the night in huge seas) I opened up the lazarette and discovered that the wire rope had come off the steering quadrant. We let the boat drift as we emptied the very full lazarette and proceeded to tighten the bolts holding the wire rope so that it stayed taut around the quadrant. That done, we proceeded on our way to Matuku. It was still hard to hold a course in those waves, but at least we could steer.
We arrived near Matuku at daybreak on Saurday, August 10, and entered the pass easily and were anchored around 8:30 a.m. It took us a couple of tries to find a suitable spot because three other boats were already there and there are multiple coral reefs in the middle of the harbor. We were never quite happy with the spot because the chain sometimes scraped on coral. But we were anchored in 50 feet of mud and the holding was good. In the Matuku harbor, the wind comes howling off the high mountains that surround it. It looks like it should be an anchorage that is protected from the prevailing winds, but instead it’s very gusty.
We rested for the rest of Saturday and then on Sunday, Jesse and Luke came and picked all of us (Song of the Sea, Saoirse, Aldabra and Ndebt) up in a long boat and took us to the main village for sevusevu. After that ritual, we walked around the village and visited the grounds of the hospital before heading back to our boats.
Brad from Ndebt took this picture as we were exploringthe main village
That day Jeff and I got some projects done. Jeff installed a new feedpump for the watermaker and I replaced the filters. We inspected the wire rope on the steering quadrant before repacking the lazarette. We refilled the diesel tank with fuel from jerry cans. Jeff fixed some wiring. And we visited with the chief of the small village where we anchored. He stopped by looking for two-part epoxy to fiberglass a seat on his boat. With no epoxy to offer, we gave him some rope. That night I was up all night as the boat was buffeted by the high gusty winds.
The next day, some folks went on a hike, led by Jesse, to the top of a mountain that looks down on the anchorage. And the day after that we had a good snorkel out near the reef next to the pass. I didn’t see a lot of interesting fish life but some of the coral was healthy in spite of being devasted by storms in recent years. Everyone came over to Aldabra for sundowners that night before Song of the Sea and Saoirse left for Kadavu in the middle of the night and Ndebt left the next morning.
Aldabra at anchor in Matuku, the wind came howling down from those hills
Aldabra found ourselves alone in this beautiful bay, surrounded by high, lush mountains. Jeff and I spent Wednesday doing laundry and cleaning up the boat. That evening, we went into the village at the invitation of the chief. His family was commemorating the death of a relative in Suva. We had kava with the men, and then went inside the house, where they held a church service for the deceased relative. Then they served a feast of delicious local food. A lot of the time they were speaking in Fijian so we didn’t know what was going on, but they were all quite hospitable. We excused ourselves after dinner to free the men up for more kava and we took our dinghy back to the boat in time for another windy, sleepless night.
Dinner at the chief’s house
The chief’s daughter
The next day, still very windy, Jeff polished the stainless steel railings and I got out fishing gear and rope that I wanted to give to Jesse. It was otherwise a lazy day. Jesse came by the next day and brought some fruit, and I gave him the gear. Jesse is a very special person. His mother had been a teacher in the main village when he was growing up. As some during his younger years, he lived a wild life. But by the time we met him, he had found religion, had a family and had become a very motivated entrepreneur. Not all of his ideas have been realized yet, but he has started a farm, he takes cruisers on hikes, and he is working out how to make Matuku a destination for cruising boats. There is a lot to uncover about Jesse, and we wished that we could have spent more time with him.
Over the next couple of days, we continued to wait out the wind, doing projects on the boat. Then on Sunday, August 18, we took the dinghy out to the pass for one last snorkel, returned and started stowing things to get ready for an overnight passage. Jesse and his daughter stopped by to say farewell. We left the anchorage in Matuku at 3:00 p.m., bound for Kadavu.
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