On June 28, we packed our bags and headed home for a short visit. Getting our bags off of the boat in a howling rainstorm was quite a feat. One of the hard parts of cruising is not seeing family for long periods of time and we were missing everyone back home. Between seeing our kids in Oxnard, Jaime's brothers, one in San Francisco and one in Havasu/ Newport Beach, and my sister's in Hemet we were on the move. A month went by before we even knew it. It felt good though to get a break from the boat for a while, but towards the end of our trip we missed Morning Light and were ready to get back on board. Only returning to Fiji meant having to deal with the generator. We had bought a portable Honda generator to take back with us but the airlines wouldn't allow it on board the plane, even though it was new and had no gas or oil in it. Honda had told us they shipped them all over the world but for some reason the airline wouldn't budge. We left it at the airport and thankfully my sister Debi and her husband Anthony drove in a few days later and retrieved it for us. We arrived in Fiji at 5am and had our taxi driver, Abdul #1, pick us up at the airport. There was a small problem with another boat part (watermaker membrane) we had brought back with us and customs wanted to charge us $200 to bring it into the country. Not wanting to pay the fine, we had Abdul bring us back to the boat so that Jaime could return with the documentation needed for customs to allow the part in duty free. It worked thank goodness. The day before we returned, there had been a fire in the sugarcane fields that had gotten out of hand and we had ash all over the boat. We had to clean a trail just to bring our bags aboard. After calling the generator mechanics to set up an appointment, we spent the next several hours cleaning the boat. Then we find out that a big birthday trio party is planned for that evening. Three of us cruisers had birthday's just a few days apart. Me, Frank on Destiny and Jan on Baraka. We were joined by John and Rene on Scarlet O'Hara and Dave and Linda on Tokati.and Glenn and Sally on The Dorothy Marie. We had a great time but faded fast as we were still on Calif. time. The next day, the girls had planned a girls day shopping trip into Nadi. I left Jaime to deal with the generator guys. I came home to some not so happy news. They weren't sure what was wrong, but would come back on Mon. Mon turned into Tues and finally they came, but with bad news. It seems like we just have a defective generator and instead of having it repaired in New Zealand we should have insisted on having it replaced. In the mean time we decide to head off to Vanuatu and deal with the generator when we get to Austrailia. Several of our friends have already left on a rally to Vanuatu that we now have missed out on. We don't want to loose out on any more of our cruising season waiting for more repairs. We had our watermaker fixed so that we can run it off of our inverter, so fresh water won't be an issue. We can charge batteries with our main engine even though it is not the greatest thing to do. We will just have to be more frugal with our power so we won't have to run the engine for long periods of time. Now I'll have to wash our clothes in a bucket. I told Jaime the less we wear, the less we wash, but it won't be a very pretty sight. Thank goodness the weather is warm. The next days are spent provisioning and saying goodbyes to friends who are going other places. We have what we think is our last goodbye dinner, the weather turns bad and we get to do it all over again because nobody leaves. This happened for 4 or 5 days in a row. Linda leaves to head to the other side of Fiji and The Dorothy Marie finally gets their generator working and plans to head out as well. It's hard saying goodbye to the many friends that we have made. We check out with customs and head out to anchor our last night in Fiji. The Dorothy Marie joins us for one last goodbye. Even though we wish we could have spent more time in Fiji, we are excited and look forward to new horizons and our next port of call. Next morning we leave for Vanuatu.