Well, we finally managed to shake off Port Vila and set sail again. It couldn't have come soon enough for me, to be honest. We had a few niggling issues onboard that we were hoping to rectify, but unfortunately, the resources just weren't available locally to fix them properly. So, we ended up doing what sailors often do: making do and pressing on. "Go as we are," as they say.
A significant portion of our time there was spent glued to the weather forecasts. According to the weather models The Coral Sea has been a real mixed bag lately, with the models in a constant state of disagreement. One day, the ECMWF would be predicting easterly winds for the week, the next it would be showing a cyclone brewing near Vanuatu and heading straight for Brisbane. Then the GFS would throw in a spanner with westerlies and a couple of lows for good measure. And then the following day, everything would change again. It was a real exercise in patience (or rather, a lack of).
Even the clearance process to enter the country was a saga. We spent a full 24 hours at anchor, just waiting to get 3/4s' of the paperwork sorted, enough to get us to the dock and allow us to disembark. The final 1/4 of the clearance finally happened on our departure day, when the biosecurity officer finally found the time to wander down to the boat. Everything seemed like a bit of an inconvenience for him. He fired off a few perfunctory questions, like if we had any garbage onboard. I'd already taken it to the trash a week before, but it didn't seem worth explaining the details so I said 'no'. Then he dropped the bombshell that the bill was 6000 Vatu (around $80), which was a bit of a surprise. I offerd him the garbage we'd accumulated in the last few days and suggest he take it as part of the service, but he said it would be an extra charge!
We began the clearing out procedure at 8am and didn't finally get the ok to leave until 3.30pm. Apparently, the delay with the customs paperwork was partly due to the officer in charge needing to pick up her kids from school despite the fact we had given them the docs hrs before school closed. It all kind of sums up the general vibe of our stay.
I also heard some interesting tales about the corruption after the earthquake. The marina owner told me they initially established a "red zone" around the town center, fencing it off while they waited for aid from the UN. But then, someone realized that with the restaurants and bars open, the place looked a bit too cheerful and not enough like a disaster zone. So, they expanded the red zone to include the bars and restaurants on the outskirts of town. And then, once the aid arrived, they shrunk the red zone again. It's a bizarre story, but it gives you a sense of the complexities there.
One of the things I did enjoy, though, was trying to decipher the Bislama signs. Bislama is the local language and very similar to Pidgin but with more of a French influence. While you can read the words, it's absolutely impossible to understand until someone tells you what it says, and then it's obvious.. Opposite the marina was a pharmacy which had a sign above the door which read "I gat specel medesen blong pikinini mo evriwan". "blong" means belongs or in this context 'for'. "medesen" is medicine, Pikinini is children (I think this is a Pidgin word as they say it in the Solomons.) so the sign says "I have special medicine for children and everyone".
Anyway, we're finally underway, and I'm hoping for smoother sailing (both literally and figuratively) from here on. The weather models are all agreeing on what's in store for the next week which is a weight off my mind.
This is one of the weather models on the 25th showing the forecast for today - it didn't look very inspiring. And its definitely not even close to the conditions we have currently.