To our delight someone has lent us an inverter. So in our final days of our travels we get the fun of the diversion of our laptops for email, blogs and most importantly, the enjoyment of watching Denzel Washinton (28 films on one cheap pirated DVD). Only Sven will understand with our previous 40 film collection of Nicolas Cage. How they get them on one DVD and still in good quality I do not know. You can go into a well respected store and it will say on the wall 'new pirated movies to copy', to resell. Denzel and Nick Cage came in mass produced, quality, high gloss packaging and have Chinese subtitles on as default. In places like we've been the western price for a DVD is completely prohibitive, public TV is ultra low coverage or non-existent and there are no movie theaters. This is one example where major studios can't complain about loss of potential sales, even comparatively rich western tourists like us aren't about to spend $840 (NZ$30 x 28) on Denzel Washington, so the typical 'lost revenue' calculations are completely wrong. We live in a time where so-called 'global' culture is increasingly defined by Hollywood so how can we reasonably cut whole nations of from that?

Now we're in Liapari, spending the time getting Solidaire ready to be abandoned. Backing the boat up into a tiny spot between a stern tied boat and a rusting steel jetty was a bit of a mission but we're almost past one of the most stressful exercise and onto excessive stowing away, packing, fixing and cleaning. We've got plenty of stuff to bring back and with weight restrictions on flights it means picking and choosing quite carefully. There are a bunch of broken things to bring home to fix, wind-vane parts, the electric autohelm, PACTOR modem, some broken cables. As we were doing some packing today it was interesting looking through some of the cold weather gear, really like - do we wear that? It seemed ridiculous to have so much excessive warm gear, and wearing it.. erhh? Putting actual clothes on, other than shorts and t-shirt, now seems bizarre to us and we can't quite seem to picture needing to wear any of our warm socks, gloves and woolen gear.

On our return to the Solomons, we have spent nights in Bairoko bay, Ghizo, Noro and other places in the Ghizo lagoon. Dealing with the various check in issue and assessing any damage from the apparent tsunamis just a month ago. Not to many tales of damage mainly we were just told that it wasn't nearly as bad as the one in 2007, and no obvious destruction- the difference between 7 and 8 in the Richter scale is huge. The quake was felt throughout this whole area though. Now at least Ghizo has got the picture and are relocating their hospital to up the hill where it is not so vulnerable to Tsunami damage, in 2007 it was massive. And the help was hard because the hospital was underwater. It's a bit scary to leave our boat in such a natural disaster hotspot but at least the boat is well protected in here.

Recently our short 3-4 hour trips have turned into day-long voyages with much reefing and changes of sail as large dark clouds appear from ahead or behind producing sometimes as high as 40 knot winds. It has not been so pleasant and helped us break even more things; the large steel bracket broke and our secondary alternator fell off the engine, probably metal fatigue, which shorted out our inverter and one of our laptop cables (thankfully not our laptop). There is some electrolysis damaging the hull, seen in bubbles on the paint below the waterline - and our electrical bilge pumps don't really wanna do their pumping job. But we are getting through it. A few more days and the boat will be shipshape and ready to spend some quality time alone.