Farewell Graham and Flynn

We sailed into the anchorage in front of the Tramonto pizza restaurant on a hill on the Norhwest side of Taveuni around 3pm on Monday, October 3. Flynn and Ian were craving for ice creams so we went ashore in the dinghy and walked over a mile to the only supermarket in Taveuni that sold ice creams. On the way we were followed by a friendly dog that we couldn't seem to get rid of. We had a lovely walk and came across the interesting weather forecast sign just outside Taveuni airport. The dog followed us all the way back to the pizza restaurant but we lost him when we went inside for food. We had to take a photo of the 'densely populated area - drive slowly' sign. There just wasn't a sole about and in town we only saw a few people. The sunset was a bit of a fizzer as a lot of cloud rolled in on the horizon and it became very overcast. We enjoyed the same lovely view but became concerned when we saw how much Faraway was rolling in the swell. We ordered beers and pizza and played with a mother cat and her kitten. The kitten had identical markings to the mother and Graham seemed to like squeezing it! After dinner we walked back down in the dark to the dinghy. It was too rolly on board to have tea or play dominoes so we all went to bed early. The boys had to be up at 6am for the 8:30am flight to Nadi then on to Melbourne. None of us had a very good sleep as the boat rolled all night. In the morning we were packed and ready to go on time at 6:30am but I wanted to burn some photos first for our visitors to take. This delayed us 15 mins and when we headed off to the beach the heavens opened up and it poured down with rain. We all got saturated including the luggage so it was a bit uncomfortable walking the mile or so into town. Luckily for us a local guy called Harry picked us up in his ute and gave us a lift to the airport. We left Graham and Flynn at 9am as the plane still hadn't taken off and we had to get sailing on Faraway to reach our next anchorage before sunset. As we were in the dinghy motoring out to Faraway we saw their plane fly overhead and the boys saw us and waved goodbye. We were lucky enough to get some wind and managed to sail and motor all the way back to the point at Costeau Resort where we anchored for the night. We cleared back into Savusavu on Wednesday, October 5 and we have been in the harbour waiting for the winds to take us to our next destination New Caledonia. We should be able to leave on Saturday, October 8 and work our way across to the eastern side of Fiji to meet the winds on either Monday or Tuesday. Well that's the plan at this stage.