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A Winter Holiday and Time on Skid Row

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If you're a boat, it doesn't get any worse than this.....cyclone pit at Vuda Greetings, L'ORIENTALs. We know we have been delinquent in posting. We received a dressing down from readers the world over including Ana from Albania who writes "capo ndodh me ju djema", which translates to "what's up with you guys ?" for the rest of the world. Point taken. A sad moment- like leaving our baby at the town dump After placing L'ORIENT in a cyclone pit (quite literally a slit-trench in the ground supported by disused car and truck tires), we hurriedly got ready to leave for the US. Living on a boat in the tropics, you only can have what you absolutely need. A constant problem we face is that we don't have winter clothes on the boat.......they'd take up too much space and quickly turn into a moldy mess. So the next best thing is to layer inappropriate clothes in a Madonna-esque way to fight the cold until we can get to Target. The view off the bow is

Nothing Says Happy 20th Better Than a Leper Colony.........

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A dyslexic celebration of our 20th anniversary We dodged Cyclone #2 of the season and began limping back to the hurricane pit, crossing between Fiji's main islands and heading Southwest. Leaving Nawi Marina and its category-5 cyclone certification (still untested, but great for marketing) was profound because should a cyclone appear we could get caught between theoretically "safe" locations (our pit in Vuda and our Marina in Nawi, 180 miles distant). L'ORIENT is showing some wear and tear, including a leaky transmission, damaged sails, and various subsystems that now work intermittently. In short, we need a fix of spare parts and weeks in a boatyard to put things back together. The reality of Fiji is that there are just no good chandleries. Our idea was that we would stop frequently along the way as we work our way Southwest. Fiji is very poorly charted, so this was out of necessity. Moving L'ORIENT can only be done in bright sunlight to avoid the killer reefs, ma