Bula all. Thursday 26th June Hopefully we can post this blog - the sat phone connection has been playing up for reasons unknown - sunspot activity or time to buy an antenna booster - or too much movement on the boat - our last two attempts failed to send and timed out - very annoying at sat phone rates!

The last few days have been wonderful - gentle steady breezes on the beam and good progress, although the wind died off last night for 8 hours, slowing us down, but making it easier for the off watch to sleep. We have decided to enter Fiji via the main shipping channel to the south, adding another 47 miles to the trip but as we will be entering at night thought it best to take the better marked channel through the reef. Depending on the wind, we hope to be in Lautoka at Vuda Marina sometime Friday.

Great excitement today - we spotted our first mountaineous land on the horizon early this morning - the Yasawa Group - easily visible from 30NM out - a huge difference from the low lying atolls of Kiribati, Marshall Islands and Tuvalu, which can barely be seen at 5 NM. Then Tony spotted a whale a couple of hundred metres behind us. A humpback we think and then for half an hour we saw them jumping and blowing up to a mile away, at least 5-6 of them. A few days earlier another pod of dolphins visited us, and on Wednesday night a spectacular sunset, almost a full 360 degrees of colour lighting up the clouds all around the horizon. The next day was sunny and absolutely cloudless, (also meaning no squalls!), followed by a beautiful clear starry night - certainly makes for enjoyable sailing.

Anyhoo, hope your week going well, we are making the most of the next 24 hours at sea before the usual clearing in process consumes the initial hours after arrival, accompanied by tidying the boat, doing the laundry, and most importantly, having a cook's night off! Sota tale. PS Thursday 03 July - update - clearly we made it into Vuda Point Marina - this is only the third time we have been in a Marina with Irish Melody, and manoevering into the sardine like berths of the circular marina basin was a little exciting after 20 months of just picking a spot in a lagoon and dropping the anchor. Tony managed it all very well, and it was wonderful to be in a calm safe haven again! We are flying back to Brisbane next week, so more news then, and hopefully some photos!