With a goal to see the "Great Astrolabe Reef" and "Kadavu", we are now taking every weather opportunity to make our way there (=south). Kadavu is a large, tall island with little population and is not exploited for mass tourism. It does have a few, small resorts, and cruise ships do visit some places.
We left Savusavu at dawn with a good wind-forecast for a 50nm trip to Makogai. Again, we passed through the "save-a-tack" passages in and out of the Namena barrier reef. This is the third time we do this and we feel comfortable doing that now in not-so-great visibility, we had a lot of clouds, but a fast sail.
In Makogai we waited in the protected anchorage by the old leper colony in Dalice bay (see older blog entry). We needed the wind to turn more east from south for the next leg: We then sailed east of Ovalau to the Moturiki channel, to a small island called Leleuvia.
There is a possibility to sail 'behind', on the west side of Ovalau, between reefs, and often in rain, since Viti Levu is tall enough to have clouds build up on that side, from the tradewinds. We avoided that and rather waited a day, and sailed in the clear east of Ovalau.
Leleuvia Island has a small and simple resort and prides itself to be just outside of the zone of rain hanging by Viti Levu.
Below pic was scraped from the resort's web-page, the red circle is where we anchored.
We did have good weather and enjoyed a quick walk around that island, a few beers and snacks.
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| Restaurant / Bar / Reception |
The accommodations are simple, Fijian style "Bures", often with shared washrooms:
A longline fishing boat had lost one of its fishing reels, with tens of miles of super-thick Monofilament fishing line. Now Dirk is trying to find out how to mount it to the back of our boat :-)
A bit further we found a sunk dug-out canoe, and tried to get it unstuck.
Well, consider the last two sentences to be our contribution to the post-factual world we live in now. The pics are real though.
