SV Panta Rhei Retirement Trip

We have been anchored in Blue Lagoon in the northern Yasawa islands. for more than a week. The days blur into endless snorkeling, napping, reading, visiting friends, visiting the local resorts and lots of good sunshine. But on the occassion of two mornings ago, I thought I should at least check the weather. I pulled up a GRIB file for the next 5 days. Everything looked like normal trade wind weather with a few rain showers. That is, everything except the top left corner of the fifth day had a dark edge with 30 knot winds. I decided to investigate that. I pulled up a little larger GRIB file and got a 7 day forecast. What I saw changed everything. On day 6 and 7 there showed a tight storm with 55 kt winds and torrential rain (rain shows as black on the GRIB viewer). Karen said she wanted none of that and our agreement was total. It was time to run away. Fortunately we had a couple days of fair weather in which to run. You need fair weather because without sun, you cannot see the uncharted reefs and reefs are everywhere. Also travel needs to happen between 10 am and 3 pm (to have a high sun angle which makes the reefs viewable), so a series of short (cloudless) hops is needed to make a long trip. A complicating factor was that our anchor windlass has quit. We have to lower and raise the anchor by other (untested) means. But happily we managed it. It is not fast (takes about an hour), but we've done it twice now successfully. We'll get the windlass fixed in NZ. In the meantime we were happy to get a mooring buoy at Musket Cove. And to make a good trip better, I managed to score some coffee beans at the local store. We were out of coffee and now that is fixed, too.

Safe to ride out the storm. That is a condition to be savored with morning coffee.