S/V L'ORIENT

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...

Hey - Where did everyone go? Happy Cyclone Season! Neptune actually jumped the gun and sent Lola (Category-5) across Vanuatu (an island group just west of Fiji), where a friend of ours on another Amel had a narrow escape. Over eight years in the Caribbean made us confident regarding hurricanes.....they start off Africa, are easily tracked as they intensify, and could be dodged/avoided because they follow reasonably predictable paths. Out here, rainbows mean here it comes, not there it goes...... We have been disappointed to learn that other than spinning in the opposite direction, cyclone season in the South Pacific may prove more challenging than its Caribbean analog. For starters, despite our wealth of weather data, we're getting a lot of "noise in the system". A dangerous storm pops up on one weather model as a threat ten days out, then disappears in the update...only to pop up on another weather model. The six models we use differ significantly, so we actually check t...