October 16, 2007

Sunny Savusavu
Savusavu is sunny, hot and calm this morning. We've had a few nice days here lately. We seem to be in a different pattern now: fine mornings with thunderstorms building in the afternoons. Our enforced lay-over has had the advantage of making sure we are totally ready to go. We finished making a new wind vane. The old one broke on the way up. The new vane is made of pvc pipe glassed and glued into a frame with a sunbrella cover. The sunbrella matches the rest of the boat canvas and I sewed our boat flags onto it: US on one side and NZ on the other. It looks pretty neat. Hope it works as well. We had hoped to sail straight to Funafuti from here, but there are a series of lows between us and there. One of them looks pretty serious - maybe the first tropical system of the year. We will definitely wait for that to pass by. Different computer models show different tracks. We're hoping it takes the one that shows it going to the southwest of us. At any rate, there looks like a smaller system behind it on a similar track. We will probably sail northeast towards Wallis and Futuna and may or may not stop in there. I've read up on them and they sound like neat places to visit - French islands. The more easting we can make the better, as the winds have been coming out of the north up near Funafuti. Most of it has been very light, so if we miss the big blows we will be happy to put up with light air if the new main and wind vane do their jobs well. Our plan now is to leave here on Friday. We don't really expect to reach the Marshalls until about Christmas. We plan to spend some time in Tuvalu and Kiribati visiting some of the outislands. More later! Karen