Land Ho!
We’ve been able to see Fiji pretty much all day now. Specifically we an enormous volcanic mountain and the attached land, which we believe to be Kadavu Island with it’s 828 meter peak of Nabukelevu (also called Mt. Washington), an extinct volcano. That is not our destination, however – we are headed initially to the port of Suva on Viti Levu island. Suva is about another seventy miles from the far West end of Kadavu.
As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, we are doing our best NOT to arrive today, Sunday the 24th on this side of the dateline. Had we pushed harder all night we could likely have been pulling into Suva around 5:00 or 6:00 p.m. tonight, but for several reasons we’d rather arrive Monday morning when Customs and Immigration are ready to receive us.
It is one of the unfortunate geographic aspects of Fiji that you must sail past many cool islands before you can actually reach a clearance port where you can legally check into the country; it isn’t legal to stop anywhere in a country until you’ve stopped and cleared in. Many do not realize that Fiji is not a single island island, but rather a large archipelago made up of about 332 islands spread over about 274,000 square miles of the South Pacific, only 3% of that is land and not every island is inhabited. Fiji is the name of the country
So first you have to let the government know you are here, and the government is on the two largest islands of Viti Levu and Vanua Levu and that is where most of the administrative offices and officials are. The most remote and untouched parts of Fiji are in the Lau group, which is upwind of the places where you clear in so they don’t get as much traffic stopping there.
So we are pacing ourselves. The wind has all but disappeared and the water is becoming glassy. So we are motoring along a just of an idle make around five and a half knots, which is just the right pace to arrive tomorrow morning in time for Customs & Immigration to get into the office.
Fishless in Paradise
As I type this we are currently getting skunked fishing. We’ve seen a few fish including the big tuna school we sailed through without a line out, but not a Mahi Mahi or tuna or other tasty fish has taken any interest in our bait. This is unfortunate, a fresh caught Mahi meal is something that everyone gets excited about though rolling about in fish guts on the lido deck isn’t generally the highlight of my trip trying to fillet the fool thing.
Settling the Oil Situation
It does look like we’ve pinned down the oil leak situation a bit better. At the time we discovered the leak we had wind, so we only ran the engine for a few minutes to test. I found the problem with the crankcase vent which sorted the oil squirting up from the dipstick.
Last night the wind died, and we finally get a chance to put the engine to a proper test. Given the nature of the problem we wanted to make sure that the engine got checked at least once every watch to see if there was any more leaking. So we ran it, we checked it.
And it leaked.
However, this time it leaked from the bottom of the dipstick tube. This tube actually appears to be a stiff hose which is connected to a hose barb on the side of the engine that leads into the oil pan. And that was where the oil was coming from. Simple enough, there are two hose clamps – all I had to do while hanging over a hot engine in a rocking boat was tighten them up a bit. It turns out they were loose and I could put a few turns on them. Problem easily solved, I wiped the area clean and we ran the engine some more and no more leaks.
It is entirely possible that the entire amount we lost in the first major leak came through this spot. It wasn’t a fast leak, but we were motoring for over thirty hours straight. I am guessing when we took the engine out to be overhauled this was removed and checked and just didn’t get tightened up enough. We’ll keep an eye on it, but we’re good for now.
Which is nice, because not much more than a whisper of wind expected to develop in the next 24 hours we’re motoring the rest of the way.
