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| Chomping At The bit |
Yesterday, we officially left Fiji again—for the third time!
Honestly, I was even more optimistic this time than I was the last two, and believe me, I was pretty optimistic then. The previous attempts hit what we started calling the "autopilot horizon," which was just 8 nautical miles to sea—the exact point where the system decided to check out.
The first time we reached the limit, I was thinking, “Wow, the wind and waves are changing direction rapidly!” until I glanced at the compass and realized we were wildly off course. After scrambling down into the engine room, tinkering, doing a hard reset, and getting zero response, we made the call to turn back for repairs.
We were incredibly fortunate to have two experts immediately available on hand. They quickly identified problem, and we ordered spares from Australia—which, of course, got immediately hung up in customs! The parts were fitted, other issues were discovered and rectified, and we left again, only to hit the autopilot horizon again.
We returned to Fiji, which, like the previous time, meant navigating a shallow, reefy bay dotted with islands. Driving around Fiji at night on a boat is definitely one of my least favorite things. To make matters worse, Customs was fairly fed up with our boomerang journey; they spent a few hours searching the boat and (for reasons still unclear to me) shouting at me.
Unfortunately our crew also ran out of time after waiting nearly 3 weeks and during all of this kerfuffle we had to get a replacement which is always tricky at short notice but we were very lucky once again.
New parts were ordered, fitted, and off we went once more. We crossed that dreaded 8 nm line, cleared the Autopilot Horizon, and have been happily trundling along ever since. The weather conditions are only about 10 knots away from perfect and it looks like we will keep this up all the way to Port Vila, Vanuatu, where we’ll stop for fuel.