19 53S 158 28E 18 October 2007

Dear friends,

We slept last night from 8pm to 6.00am and woke in a wind-swept stretch of ocean. Anchored in 6 metres of azure blue water clear enough to see the sand and sea-cucumbers on the bottom, we are in the lee of a sand bar in Chesterfield Reef. As I turned on the SSB radio for the morning radio-net, I put my head up the companionway and a booby took a careful look at Harmonica as he flew past 5 to 10 metres away.

Then omelettes for breakfast! The galley is barely rocking, there is no hurry to get jobs done, and we have lots of fresh food on board which cannot be taken into Australia. They were lovely. We sat in the cockpit eating them and watching the sea birds which breed on the tiny sand-bars which poke out of the sea beside us.

Chesterfield is nearly 70 miles long and 40 miles wide, and we would love to know how the early explorers ever got round it with poor charts and noon sun-shots only when the clouds clear at the right time. Very little of the reef breaks the surface and mostly it is just a rim of coral 0 to 1 metre under water. Outside that, the swell is 3 to 4 metres high. It is written that the Polynesians navigated by seeing the changes in wave pattern as they past islands, and we see the changes but then the wind and the remote storms a thousand miles away also affect the waves.

We have sent an e-mail to Australian Customs as we are required to warn them before our arrival. Bundaberg, Queensland which is still nearly 500 miles ahead, and a high pressure system leaving the Australian Coast will create strong winds here in the Tasman/Coral Sea for a few days. We checked out from Luganville in Vanuatu with a permit to sail to New Caledonia, but the wind stayed well south of east until we gave up and sailed west instead.

Our visit to Vanuatu was fascinating and enjoyable, but we were dogged by wet weather and poor decisions. Dave also suspects that his anti-malaria medication was having side-effects, and he stopped taking it after 4 weeks on the advice of a pharmacist, who told us that there is no chloroquine-resistant malaria on the islands we visited. We received an e-mail from a boat that said we should not bother with Tanna because the volcano was a disappointment and the island was unexciting. We checked in further north in Port Villa, sailed north to Espiritu Santo, and were told repeatedly how wonderful Tanna had been. So we bought air tickets and flew!

The Trade winds in Vanuatu blow consistently from the south of east, and Dave had not realized how hard it would be sail south in the island chain. The northern end is the most remote but also the rainiest. The last documented act of cannibalism was well into our life time (Long as that may be). In one village, we were treated to a Kastom Dance. The dress was revealing and one person thinks their e-mail address got black-listed by an automatic porn checker after she described the lack of clothing so just look up "small nambas" in a good encyclopaedia or guide book!

Many peoples of Vanuatu are shy, but smile and enjoy company. Half the schools are French and half English, and each region has its own language, so the national lingua franca is a pigeon-english called Bislama. We were most hospitably received in several villages, particularly Lamap in Malekula where we were invited home for lap-lap supper. There was an airport marked a few miles away, and when we wanted a walk, it seemed a feature to aim for. There was a clearing in the trees with cattle grazing the long grass, the rusty remains of antenna, a wind-sock frame without material to blow, and a small white building with one wall falling in. We assumed it was a WW2 site, but were amazed to find that Air Vanuatu still schedules 2 flights per week.

Our flight to Tanna was possibly the highlight of our visit to Vanuatu. The weather was clear and dry. We climbed to edge of the volcano crater on two separate evenings (once with a guide and once without) and watched bursts of red hot lava being thrown into the night sky. We stayed in a "guest house" called The Jungle Oasis where we had a hut under the trees and electricity to charge the camera for a few hours each evening. It was an over-grown local village in which everybody was a close relative and the family grew their fruits and veggies, looked after us, cooked, and arranged transport to the airport across the island. A film crew happened to be staying there to film a "reality TV show" and it was fun talking to the team of heli-ski guides from New Zealand who had been hired to set up a jungle gymnasium in the banyan trees. Each day, we walked the 6 km to the east coast where we found Lea's Ianiuia restaurant hut on the beach beside one local village. Nothing but thick bush, foot-paths to the vegetable gardens, and one dirt road leading 40 miles to the airport. We saw the sad wreck of Crystal Dancer which had been a 42 ft sailing boat until it hit the reef 2 months earlier. Everybody was thankfully safe. In Pt Vila, we bought Crystal Dancer's wheel as it fits better into Harmonica's cockpit.

The French fell in love (as the French do) with the South Pacific. We met 2 French couples who had set up remote businesses to live by the sea. A resort of little huts called Relais Baie de Tortues on Tanna was run by a man and wife far away from other Europeans. Jean-Pierre and Anna were superb, trained cooks who, for 12 years, have operated the Oyster Island resort and restaurant where we spoiled ourselves to a delicious meal on the east coast of Santo.

Time now to visit Les Trios Illots Du Mouillage were the baby terns and boobies are nesting. There are many petrels around too. These get fascinated by our navigation light at night and chirrup as they fly round it occasionally bumping the sail.

We'll be back in Calgary for Christmas and in England again at the end of January. We shall not return to Harmonica until May after the wedding of our son Mark to Heidi Zealand.

Dave & Jan

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