Sailing Evenstar

We spent a couple of days chilling and establishing the lie of the land. Savusavu is a great town and Fijians are super friendly. It was time to re-provision for the next part of the trip.  We found the fresh food markets but Raj's greengrocer was also pretty good. After the often miserly fresh produce offerings in French Poly it was a cornucopia of green delights.  The butcher had all the pretty decent looking cuts of meat handily snap frozen in cryovac bags.  Savusavu pubic markets. We knew we'd be needing kava to present to the chiefs in the remote anchorages we'd be heading to. Sevusevu is the process of coming ashore, politely requesting permission to anchor and fish in the village's waters,  and presenting a gift of kava to the village head.   Easso scores the kava at the kava market. However, first it was time for Sandrine to head off on the next leg of her ambitious world journey. We got her and her kit ashore in the dinghy, and helped assemble her reclined bike

We picked up our passports and completed exit documentation from the Gendarmerie, then ran around and spent every last one of our XPF currency. Soon we were back on the boat for the final departure prep.  We sailed out into a clear and beautiful afternoon with moderate easterlies, but with some trepidation. We'd diligently whacked all the maintenance moles and the boat was ready to go. But now, the  generator had decided to start it's intermittent fault game again, shutting itself off every 10 minutes. No generator would mean no freezer, no fridge, no watermaker, and no autopilot. But there was nothing for it unless we wanted to go back to Raiatea and chance another week to try and find someone to fix it.  The weather modelling had us scribing a big arc to the north, finishing at about the same latitude, but avoiding a big windless hole that was forecast in the middle.  After an uneventful first night’s sail, which allowed the engine room to cooled down, it was time to get the