We are planning to clear out tomorrow so we spent today taking care of lots of little things. Internet, email, paying bills (unfortunately these follow you even when you go cruising in remote places), coordinating with contacts at future ports, malaria planning and the like.

The Malaria research has been very interesting. While Africa is the source of the vast majority of malaria cases and deaths in the world, Vanuatu is also an infected area. When reviewing the south pacific malaria regions earlier in the season I noticed that the only place rated worse than Vanuatu was the Solomon Islands. I have talked to cruisers who have been through both without catching Malaria and I have talked to those who did catch malaria. Both groups loved the Solomons anyway. The only people we have talked to that didn't like the Solomons were folks who have never been there. We have a two month supply of Malaria meds so hopefully we'll stay clean. The US Center for Disease Control has been by far the best reference for us on health matters while traveling. The World Health Organization is ok but all references I have come across pale when compared to the CDC's Yellow book. ( http://wwwn.cdc.gov/travel/contentYellowBook.aspx )

Our batteries are having a hard time over the past few days. It has been cloudy so the solar is not kicking in. Running the engines for a few hours does not do much with the marginal 60-80 amp alternators pumping out on 13.4 volts. We really need a good charge with our charger but the genset is down for a couple weeks and the shore power is 220 (we need 110). We are trying to line up a transformer so that we can get a good absorption charge before we take off.

The weather is looking pretty flat for the next week so we will probably motor most of the way to Port Vila. This will give the bats enough time to top up. They are getting to the middle/end of their life span though. They cycle almost every day and they were installed in September of 2005. That's approaching 1,000 cycles which is the low end of the range you can expect. We try to only discharge to 80% which might give us as much as 2,000 cycles but we will have to see. Deciding which batteries to install next will be a big decision, for another blog.

We went to the First Landing resort for dinner tonight. A little path leads from the marina to the resort. For $5 Fijian a day ($2.50 US) you can use the pool all you want. Our friend Margaret has been spoiling us and bought us passes today so we enjoyed the pool during the hot afternoon. The restaurant is nice and seats outdoors by the water on clear days. Food is pretty reasonable (expensive for Fiji). They had some brilliantly colored lobster. Tonight we got lucky as they had a dance show. The dance troop did dances from all over the South Pacific including Tahiti, Tuvalu, Kiribati, The Solomon Islands, The Cook Islands, Fiji, and Tokelau. The big finale was Samoa with their well known fire dance. It was a lot of fun.