Enjoying Vanuatu

Sunday 13th July

We have now been here for 2 days and its great to be back with the fleet.
Arrival was into the harbour through a reef in a 30 knot squall, not too pleasant. I could have used some skiing goggles to help see through the rain. Then we made our way to the quarantine buoy area and anchored for the night, before collapsing into bed.

Saturday morning was bright and warm. Contacted the WARC organiser, Mandy, and she got the customs and the quarantine out to us fairly quickly. All cleared and then we went into the boat harbour and tied up to the fuel jetty, outside another WARC boat. We're OK for the weekend as the fuel dock is closed till Monday. Then we hope to move to the harbour wall and moor there as there is power and water laid on. During the day we all managed to do a little clean up of BlueFlyer too.

Sunday and the customs cleared us to go island cruising up north to Porto Santo, or Luganville as it is now called. Then there was a lovely lunch organised by the Vanuatu Cruising & Yacht Club, the tourist board and the WARC. Various awards and prizes were presented before the lunch and we all stayed in the club until around 6pm. Returned to the boat to get ready for dinner in the Waterfront Bar along with various other boats.

Tomorrow I will go and see Asolare who is changing all 12 of his batteries. As they are 12 month old gel batteries we should get 5 decent ones out of them. If not, then Plan B is to go to the island battery importer, a chinese man, and see what he has available and at what cost. BlueFlyer's present batteries are now in need of the Last Rites! To make matters worse the generator temperature alarm and shut down appears to be faulty, and now shuts down the unit after about 20 minutes run time. Very annoying!

Next plan is to leave here on Tuesday to go cruising up to Luganville.