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We are now in Vanuatu; we have been
here for almost three weeks now. We arrived on the 12th after a rolly
downwind passage. On our first night out we broke our boom in an
accidental gybe, which caused a bit of excitement we could have done
without. It broke on a place that Dad had bent at the beginning of the
trip and then we had bent back in New Zealand, with an aluminum splice
riveted to it. When we gybed, the boom, which was tied to the side of the
boat to keep it from gybing, broke in half right where it had been bent
before! We lashed the boom to the deck and kept on going. We learned a lot
on that passage about how you don’t need a mains’l to sail downwind.
In Vanuatu we checked in at Port Vila and started out
trying to get our boom fixed. We found a boatyard run by two Frenchmen who
did a good job with it. It is stronger now by far than it was when we left
New Zealand. We even got them to paint it and now you can't even tell that
it was broken. It has a sleeve on the inside welded onto the boom.
Vanuatu used to be owned by Britain and France, two
governments at once! They have been independent for 19 years, a short time
really. Independence Day was yesterday. Both cultures obviously had a big
impact here. French is spoken widely, and there are lots of French people
and things like baguettes, French pastries, and lots of French
restaurants, Luckily for us though, Britain was one of the two owners, and
English is much more widely spoken. The national language is Bislama
though, Pidgin English, which is like, but unlike English. For example,
'thank you very much' is 'thank you tumas' in Bislama. 'Wannem name blong
you?' is 'what is your name?', and 'Name blong me Bronwen ' is 'my name is
Bronwen'. It is a very strange language. We have had a few people who
speak no English come out to our boat to trade us fruit, and it is
surprisingly hard to understand them.
Independence Day was quite fun in Port Vila. Almost
all of town shut down, but behind town in Independence Park there were
masses of people. It was sort of like a fair at home without the rides.
There were many food stalls and some dancing on the stage. The whole time
this guy was talking over the loudspeaker in Bislama.
We just got back from Tanna where we went to see the
still active Yasur Volcano. We had a horrible time getting down there with
rough seas and wind coming right from where we wanted to go. Then we got a
lot of strong wind while we were there on a lee shore, the strongest we
have seen so far on this trip, gusting to 50 knots. While we were there
the wind shifted again and blew sand from the volcano all over our boat,
really gritty, and getting everywhere. The volcano was cool though; we
could see it spitting out boulders when it got dark, red-hot boulders and
clouds of ash. It was really something. We took lots of pictures. In the
harbor we also saw the friendly dugong that lives there. A dugong is like
a mix between a sea lion and a whale, it has a blowhole and a whale tail
but is white and six feet long. The one in Tanna is very frisky and we had
a lot of excitement with it in our tippy sailing dinghy.
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