And another try!    Tuesday, 05/12/2023

Those of you who have looked at the site will have seen that my last trip was aborted. We were 14 hours out. The time was 03:34 on Friday morning and the autopilot’s chain broke. Although it was tough to turn around and head back – again – it seemed to me that it was the sensible thing to do. We arrived back at 10:30 on Saturday morning. 

First thing Monday morning I got the repair workshop moving, with instructions to find a replacement chain (rather than trying to repair the existing one). By 09:00 this morning the new chain had been fitted. 

In the next few hours we will leave. A little last minute food buying and then customs and immigration clearance, paying the marina office and finally topping up with fuel, and then we’re off. The weather is good. Probably have a dearth of wind from tomorrow noon for perhaps 20 hours, otherwise the forecast is for reasonable wind in the next few days. Hopefully this will prove accurate. 

This will be our third attempt to leave Fiji for New Zealand. All I can say is that I hope it will be more successful than the previous attempts…