Happiness is...

 Stardate August 30, 2023


Happiness is a good anchor set.  Happiness is decreased when the wind shifts and your anchor chain gets blown over a coral bottom.  Think of someone moving furniture over the floor above your head (without wheels).  Now imagine the floor only two feet above your head.  Now imagine random jerks and shakes of the boat as the anchor chain makes its way across the coral in the middle of the night.  Yeah, it’s pleasant and relaxing.  Every vibration of the anchor chain gets propagated up to the boat where it is amplified by the deck right above the vee berth.  I wound up moving to the salon to cut down on the noise.


This morning I radioed Nick and said I had to move the boat.  He said I would need help - the winds were gusting to 35 knots in our ‘sheltered’ cove.  So I dinghied over to get him.  As we pulled the anchor up you could see the white coral that hadn’t been an issue the night before.  The chain caught twice on the coral as it was being raised.  I moved to the right about fifty meters and dropped the hook in 30 feet of obvious sand.  Set the anchor *hard* and relaxed.  


Wind is still howling.  High wind warming from Fiji Met.  Should die down by Friday.  Our plans are to leave at the crack of dawn Friday and head up the chain.  May stop in at Blue Lagoon (site of the Brooke Shields movie) for fuel.  Or not.  We have to get across to Vanua Levu before next Tuesday as another set of howling easterlies is predicted which would really make our lives miserable trying to get to Savusavu.  

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