Sun

Today I happened to be round for the sunrise and sunset. Nothing spectacular today but just showing the views from the eastern beach for the sunrise and from the house site for the sunset.

 

 

Otherwise, things that have happened... Well, we got a fair bit of rain and collected about 300 litres in the barrels. We also got to have a shower in the rain although it took a while to rinse off but it wasn't TOO cold and at least it was refreshing.

We went fishing again and Mandy caught a little bitty fish, whereas I caught nothing. We also went snorkeling, which we haven't had much chance to do. Found some wonderful new coral beds but I neglected to take any photos.

We have the fridge and freezer going now so that's made the variety of food available a bit more interesting.

Most of our time is spent continuing to clear the house site, which is tediously slow.

Hot, hot and a little bit cool

Lovely relaxing day in paradise today.

Today was a bit hotter than it has been recently at around 30C but we made it even hotter by burning off the trees we cut down yesterday. Amazingly they burnt pretty well considering they were green. We burnt about a cord of good firewood, but what are you gonna do...

But, also we had a bit of cool today by turning on the fridge for the first time. Nothing like a nice cool glass of lemonade (they call the fruit something like kola and they are are bit like a cross between, lemon, lime and mandarin), and a nice chilled fruit salad. You'd think with all the fruit it would be easy to get a fruit salad but it seems if you want a decent fruit salad here you have to make it yourself. Could have done with some pineapple, but. At the moment I'm just running the chest freezer with an external thermostat to run it at 4C and will monitor power before running it as a fridge and freezer.

Sherri and Larry who live on a yacht near Ano beach also called by with a nice cold homebrew stout, so it's been a refreshing day.

There was an 8.2 magnitude earthquake about half way between Fiji and us. It shook for more than 30 seconds here and there have been a few long aftershakes since. Fortunately no major tsunami because our island is not very high.

Solar panels

After a trip into town to track down some Allen Keys we mounted the solar panels today.

 

We've been using one panel leaned up against the shed for the last week or so and it's been providing enough power for lights, charging drills, headlights, laptops, radios, etc.  Although I won't actually be able to hook up all four panels (for one kilowatt) until I get some more hardware from China, two should be sufficient to start using the fridge-freezer in the coming days. We've got quite used to having no fridge but it will make life a lot easier to have a freezer.

We still haven't been able to buy any guttering but some more should arrive on one of the next few ships so hopefully it won't be too long before we can start collecting water off the shed roof. I haven't had a shower for about a month now due to lack of water, but despite advice to the contrary it is quite possible to get soap to lather up in sea water. Sure, if you try to use a block of soap in the sea it just turns to inert rubber, but if you wet yourself down and rub frantically with a block of soap out of the water it works pretty well. It's quite refreshing to stand wet and starkers in the trade winds and it largely deals to the issues of smelliness. Shampoo is similarly [in]effective.

We haven't mastered fishing here yet. We caught a one inch flounder and a couple of small, unknown reef fish, so we couldn't eat them. Some of the reef fish cause Ciguatera and we don't know which is which yet. I've seen the skipjack tuna coming up into the reef around mid-tide but for one reason or another have not been able have a fish when they were there. They're not considered a great fish by most (much like Kahawai in NZ) but they look pretty damn good to me.

The coming days have us staring down the prospect of more bush and scrub cutting to start clearing the house site. There's also still some heavy gear to cart up from the beach that we've been procrastinating about doing.

Nascent garden

It's Sunday again, the day of worship. This holy day marks the beginning of our garden, of sorts. The first papaya and sugarcane have emerged.

This week I hope to get the solar panels on the shed roof. First step was a ladder:

I've tested it to 85kg so I guess we can rate it as safe for 40kg max. 

There's a whopping great tree that casts a shadow around 3pm that I should have dropped before I put the shed up. It's going to be a bit dodgy. I might drop it before we put the panels up, just in case. At least I can repair a shed.

Empty container

Today we moved the last of the container contents over to the island. The container will get picked up on Monday and returned to the wharf. Good riddance! I probably should have taken a photo of an empty container or the last raft-load of gear but I didn't. However, after a month sleeping on an air mattress the best thing we achieved today was a real mattress.

Bliss.

We're going to go into town tomorrow to celebrate with pizza and beer. The market is particularly good on Saturdays as well. We don't often make it in on Saturdays because we bum a ride with one of the other residents of the island who goes in on Tuesdays and Fridays. We take them over in our boat and they drive us into town. It's a good deal for all.

Fair winds

We've had a break in the trade winds for a couple of days so have managed to get the solar panels, freezer, tools, fencing materials and even a couple of the 200mm x 4.8m house poles over to the island. 

We met some lovely Irish folk travelling the South Pacific who called in, curious about the poles we were moving. They have a few able-bodied lads aboard and are going to pop out tomorrow morning to haul the posts up to the house site. That will save a lot of pain winching them up. We'll have to duck back to the mainland first thing and grab the other two poles to make the most of their hospitality.

Other than that we just have 30 sheets of plywood, mattress, a door and about 30 4.8m lengths of 150x50 framing left to bring over. It's looking likely we'll make our deadline with 3 more raft trips in the coming days, weather permitting.

I saw my first local owl today... big birds. Unfortunately I found it dead in the well. We've been using rain water for the last week but we're down to about 50 litres so unless we get rain soon we'll need to clean out the well again. Well, we were going to clean it out again anyway, but that's a bit gross.

Ahhhh, a shed

We'd been sitting on our hands the last few days waiting for the wind to calm down a bit, but to no avail so yesterday we headed to the mainland in waves higher than the dinghy with a new plan. We loaded up 18 sheets of iron into the dinghy and set off to the sheltered side of the island then walked the dinghy around in the low tide to our side of the island. So, we got the iron and now we have a shed to store our stuff in. I feel more complete now that I have a shed!

 

Now the priority shifts from building a shed to moving the contents of the container over to the island. We have twelve days until the container has to be returned. It looks like Friday might be suitable to do a load on the raft so we might get solar panels and the freezer over here.

On our last trip with the raft one of the barrels took on some water and several barrels had big indentations in them. We thought we might have a crack but today we checked and they are ok. Perhaps it was just something to do with the change in air temperature? We've sealed the openings up with silicone. Fingers crossed our solar panels and freezer don't sink. We may have to walk the raft around the island.