At sea once more, and it's my Birthday, we're on route from a little island called Makongi, to Port Ellington. started my Birthday celebrations last night with our young crew member Amy and her boyfriend, Max, crew from the BIG yacht, "Moonraker". We had a lovely dinner and a few nice wines, then off to bed early, to give Amy and Max some time alone and also early to bed as we had a 5am wake up call. It's an 8 hour trip today to get to the anchorage with good viability to see the reef and coral heads as we come in. Hopefully, we'll meet "Moonraker"there as we have a few bottles of champagne on board to have some Birthday cheer for me.

We left SavuSavu the day before yesterday and headed for Makongi Island. Makongi was very interesting as it was an EX and EX in big letters Leper Colony. It took all the Lepers from the South Pacific, during the time it was opened in 1911 until the last Lepers left in 1969. A cure for Leprosy was discovered in 1948 but it did take a while once the medicine was started for the last signs of it to go away. During the time it was in operation 4,000 Lepers were accommodated there and there are 1,700 graves on the island. Remains of the colony are still there, with many of the houses in ruin. The hospital was pulled down to build the school are there are about 80 people still living on the island. Many of them decedents of the workers that were here when the Leper Colony was in operation, the older ones still remember when it was in operation and told us some stories of the times. Very interesting, I was glad to hear that the Lepers were not in pain. A bacteria would just eat away at their skin and they would look down and one of their fingers had been eaten away, awful, awful disease.

Now as we are at sea, I have some time to write, our time in port is just so busy, seeing all the new sights, getting to know a new anchorage and town, meeting all the locals and socializing lots with all the yachts in the anchorage we catch up with along the way.

We did a night landfall into SavuSavu anchorage at 3:30 am on Monday 3rd September. It was good viability, so we could see all the other boats in the anchorage and fortunately were able to find a spare mooring ball (there's no anchoring in the river).

Morning saw us in another quaint anchorage, and village close to shops, restaurants and facilities. We were up early enough to hear Curly's Cruising Sked at 8:30am which gave us all the low down on our new home. Curly is a New Zealander who has lived in SavuSavu for 38 years, so full of info. He originally came here to train the locals in Jungle Warfare and just never went back. He absolutely loves it. He owns The Bosun's Locker and does so much it's hard to get to the bottom of all his interests. Twice a week though he runs very good seminars The one we went to was titled "How not to go aground in Fiji, using C-map or Maxsea". He prints mini charts with all the waypoints on all the main routes around Fiji, which is great. You then plan your trip using his waypoints rather than our Maxsea (computerized charts which are not very accurate in this part of the world). On the way here Maxsea had us sailing right across a reef, so you have to have your wits about you and also keep up to date with your paper charts as well.

We had really forgotten how very friendly the Fijians are. They have huge great big smiles are very helpful. We spoke to many of the locals and they said it is a special place as it wasn't really affected by the military takeover. They are a very together community with the Fijians, Indians and local Chinese all getting along extremely well.

We spent 6 days in this delightful little town and experienced more rain than we have for the past 1 =BD years. It's supposed to be the dry season, so the locals were very surprised as well. It was also great being in a place with more realistic prices, so we had many lunches and dinners ashore which were all a very short walking distance from the boat.

One day we hired a local taxi driver to drive us to Labasa, a larger town on the other side of the islands. We went through beautiful countryside with soaring mountains, waterfalls and of course gorgeous tropical rainforests. Then we crossed the mountains to the leeward side and suddenly we were driving through a totally different landscape. The grass was yellower, coconut trees were replaced by Pine Forests and there were fields and fields of sugarcane. The driver explained that you go in a different direction on the island and the landscape changes again and you will see rice fields. So it is a very fertile island, with numerous different natural resources.

Today, we only have a 50 mile passage, so a nice easy one, we're heading for Makongi Island where we will stay for the night. We'll head off again in the morning as we are running short of time to get to Musket Cove for the start of Race Week. We have to go into Lautoka to clear in and organise a letter from Immigration, so my brother, Jim can fly into Nadi on a one way ticket. Also we hope we can pick up a new anchor windlass motor, as ours broke down this morning and Greg had to pull up 50 meters of chain by hand. These things are sent to try us, Greg had just overhauled the windlass motor and we thought it would last us a lot longer than this.

We may be lucky at the next few anchorages and it will either be a shallow anchorage or some other nice yachties may allow us to raft up alongside them, so we don't have to drop the anchor. Will have to wait and see as the Captain doesn't like to ask favours like that. As I said though, we raft up all the time at home!!!!!