Welcome back to Fiji during cyclone season. Hot, humid, and a breeding ground for mold. Friends who live here assured us that if you stand still for five minutes, you’ll need to use a Clorox wipe to get the mold off your skin. Most of the boat had a green tinge to it before a good scrub.

The new Code C is here to replace the shredded Code Zero. I can’t wait to fly this one.

The first few days back it was either this…

or this. Torrential downpour, or light sprinkle.

Every time we go back to visit Minnesota, Lowe goes back to martial arts. I’m proud of him for it. It would be easy for him to quit, especially since every time he goes he has to start over. He would have achieved this belt years ago if he were living in a house down the street. This time he was in town just long enough to graduate a belt.

We’ve been having some troubles with the gas pressure at the stove. Can’t imagine why.

Bilge pump sensor switch. Our last few weeks onboard last season required someone flipping a breaker to turn on the bilge pump when you were taking a shower (I had to bypass the auto-switch). Not a huge inconvenience, but an annoying one, considering it’s such a simple inexpensive part. When you buy a used boat, just know that the owner probably didn’t mean to jerry-rig everything that broke, he probably just couldn’t get the parts he needed because of where he was when it broke, and then he just learned to live with the fix. Unless the boat has only lived in the U.S.—where anything and everything is available within 24 hours—in which case the owner has no excuse for his jerry-rigging.

This boat has Garmin equipment onboard, and over the past year or so I’ve grown to hate everything about Garmin. This is our VHF. It’s eight years old, which by Garmin standards, renders it 100% obsolete. What broke and made the entire unit worthless? The cord for the VHF mic. That’s it. The cords became stretched and brittle (think 1980s telephone cord stretched from the kitchen phone all the way to the basement). Contact Garmin asking for a replacement cord. Oh, that isn’t a thing. We don’t sell cords because they are wired directly to the handset. Okay, so I have to buy a whole new handset, let’s go ahead and do that then. Oh, you can’t do that. The new handsets are not compatible with your VHF. Is there any handset that is compatible? No, you’ll have to replace the entire VHF.

Could I possibly have done some MacGyver wiring to try and save the old handsets? I asked an electrician in Mexico, and he couldn’t do it, so probably not. But maybe.

Anyway, in the end I bought the new model. It’ll probably be a worthless paperweight in two years, but that’s Garmin.

I brought the new unit with me, assuming that it would be a simple installation. Plug and play. Honestly, I don’t know why I would have thought such a thing. First, they had changed the pins on half the cords (thus why we couldn’t just buy a new handset). About the only thing I could plug into the new VHF from the old one was the antenna. This means that the two speakers that are located out at the steering stations will not work. To get the third speaker to work I thought I’d pop out the old one and insert the new. Nope. Garmin had changed that from a circle to a square. This is literally just a speaker with a volume knob. What improvement could they have made that would require a larger cutout?

When I was almost finished I went to plug in the power cord, and what do you know, different again. I could either run the new wire throughout the boat, which would require tearing apart walls and trying to fish wires through inaccessible areas, or I could splice the old and the new together and pray they worked.

But before I went ahead and did that I thought to myself, “I wonder if these eight tiny colored wires from the old one are the same as the new one?” I decided to dig out the old VHF manual and compare, and I was very glad I did. Not one color matched up with the other. Orange would go to blue, yellow to gray, etc..

Bumfuzzle’s Official Product Review: Garmin. A job that should have required a $200 replacement microphone (or really a $50 cord), instead requires a new $700 VHF, new wall cutouts, and all new wiring. Garbage products, garbage company.

We’ve also got a Garmin chartplotter with a screen that has gone black (the price of these replacements actually go up the older they get), and a Garmin radar that needs (hopefully) a new cord run through the mast in order to fix it. I don’t actually use the chartplotter for anything other than the depth, and we still have one that works, but geez I’d love to rip every piece of Garmin off this boat and toss them in the garbage to be replaced with super basic wind and depth instruments and our iPad for charts. I don’t know how these companies haven’t been rendered obsolete by now.

Wow, that ended up being quite the rant.

I knew it was still going to be hot and humid. There is still two months of cyclone season ahead of us, but we were hopeful it would be bearable and we could just get cruising locally a little earlier. It was anything but bearable. I didn’t want to tell Ali, fearing she’d change flights and leave me stranded here alone for another month. Then she sent me a screenshot of some alert she’d gotten from the Fiji Meterological Service warning “Exceptional Hot and Humid Conditions Due to Adiabatic Heating.” The cat was out of the bag.

Worth mentioning is that the shore power here is European, meaning we can’t plug in the boat. That means the five air-conditioners on this boat are worthless to us. We’ve got an extension cord running from the shore power box into the boat where we have two cheap fans and a car-style battery charger plugged in. It’s less than ideal.

Light reading here at the boat. Probably one of the greatest books ever written. Seriously, if you can’t flip through this book and be inspired to sail around the world, then it simply isn’t going to happen for you. This isn’t exactly our timeline for the next couple years, but it’s pretty close to our expected route.

Normally I wouldn’t talk about a marina’s showers, but this is the view when you are standing under the water. At ~$500/month this marina (Nawi Island) is a bargain.

The design of this boat’s engine compartments somehow allows the occasional dripping of saltwater onto the alternator. Yeah, that’s not a great design, and is something I now have to figure a solution to. I got back to the boat after two months away and found that the engine wouldn’t start. I checked a few things, and didn’t see any obvious issue, but I had my suspicions. I took off the belt and tried to turn the alternator pulley by hand—seized solid.

I removed the alternator, losing ten pounds of water weight in the process (oh my god was it hot in that engine compartment), and went right to the taxi stand in town. In places like this, if you have an engine related issue, the person to ask for a recommendation is a taxi driver. They know everyone in town and have had to keep their clunkers running for years without access to an Autozone for spares.

I hopped in the taxi, and a minute later we pulled up outside a shop where, I kid you not, there was a man sitting on a little wooden stool on the sidewalk with an alternator torn down into tiny pieces in front of him. He was soldering wires while his assistant held them steady. This was clearly the man I needed. Two days later I’d pick up my now refurbished alternator and drop off the one from my other engine. Might as well.

The view from the Planter’s Club at dinner.

It took me months to get a reply from the French company that makes these battcar/batten pieces. The old design of these parts was horrible and we constantly had them failing, leaving our mainsail flapping wildly, and freely, in the wind. I’d used up every available spare I had, so scoring these replacements was a must. I’d contact the company, they’d send me back an invoice in French, and then my follow-up questions would go unanswered. My phone calls would go unanswered as well. Finally, after three months, I was wiring the money to France. Yeah, wire transfer was the only way to pay them, apparently. My bank forced me to undergo a twenty minute interrogation before they’d release the princely sum of $250 (for three of these). By the end I was practically begging them to send the money. “I don’t care if I’m being scammed! Just send this Nigerian Prince the $250! He’s promised to allow me to use my mainsail again, and to make me fabulously wealthy!”

Sunny, and hot, but it felt like something was starting to change. Less humid.

Meanwhile, in Minnesota, packing was underway.

Up the main to hook up the jib again. We took the sail down while we were away, for cyclone prep.

This is how they keep the stores from flooding during the rainy season—slanted sidewalks.

Ali and the kids had a nearly 48 hour trip back to the boat, all spent in airplanes or airports. Let’s just say that Fiji doesn’t see a lot of American tourists, and those that it does see probably only come because their trip begins from SFO or LAX and doesn’t go beyond the main island of Nadi. Getting from Minnesota to Suvasuva is a test.

They arrived in SFO and headed down to baggage claim where they found that one of their bags had disappeared. Delta actually said, “Not our problem once it’s on the conveyor belt.” Never mind that they unload the luggage onto the conveyor belt while you are still standing in row 48 of the airplane behind 300 other passengers. Fortunately, a couple of hours later, Delta called and said they had found the bag in their office. They never did say how or why it ended up in there. Also, fortunately, Ali and the kids were stuck sitting in SFO for ten hours just waiting to be able to check in for their overnight flight to Fiji.

Whatever, after a ridiculously long couple of days they all arrived in SVU (not SUV) with smiles on their faces. Time to get back to normal life.