Karl & Kara Go Sailing

  Wednesday 25 th October, Nouméa, Nouvelle Calédonie. Bonjour a tous! We are once again back on French territory and enjoying all the civilised treats that come with that. We're anchored in the harbour off the capital Nouméa just waiting, waiting, waiting (along with lots of other Aussie boats) for the elusive weather window back home to Brissie. In the meantime we're keeping a close eye on the lovely Lola – a cat 5 cyclone that's hitting our neighbour Vanuatu at the moment. She's forecast to weaken before she gets to us so let's keep our fingers crossed. I guess it was to be expected – we did get that late season cyclone just after leaving Mooloolaba in May 2019 so it's nicely symmetrical that the Universe has thrown this early season (earliest on record actually) one at us too. All that's missing now is another earthquake. Grand, soft, Irish day in Nouméa. So we escaped Fiji and had, shock horror, a perfectly uneventful passage to New Cal and, shock ho...

Tuesday 10 th October (Fiji Day), Port Denarau, Fiji. Fiji? I thought we were going to New Cal? Well, you know how to make the Gods laugh – tell them your plans. So we're not in New Cal with our friends eating entrecôte and drinking Bordeaux Superieur, we're stuck in Port Denarau. On the bright side things are looking up again (it got pretty low there for a while) and we should be leaving tomorrow bound for New Caledonia at last. So, long story, but let's start back in Tonga after the new stay and refurbished furler arrived (happy days!). The day finally dawned to get the new stay up and the crew of Mac kindly volunteered to assist. We got Karl climbing up the mast on a halyard secured to a deck cleat and when he was half way up the cleat started to rip out of the deck. Brilliant. Gráinne's literally breaking up around us. So we got him back down and used a different cleat (and added "fix cleat" to the to do list). Karl went back up, we sent the stay up af...