The Luckiest Fish in the World

0800 Position 17-26S 177-02W. 215 miles from Savu Savu, Fiji

We finished clearing out of Tonga at 11AM yesterday and departed for Fiji. We are headed for Savu Savu on Vanua Levu, and the wind is blowing directly towards our destination. Normally that would be a good thing, but Van Diemen doesn't have a spinnaker pole to wing the jib out so we can't sail dead down wind. We have to sail thirty degrees higher than DDW to keep the jib full. The wind direction hasn't changed since we left Tonga, and it is not forecast to change much, so we will be zigging and zagging to get to Savu Savu. That's not a problem, it is comfortable sailing but we end up sailing more miles. We are still hoping to get in to Savu Savu in time to clear customs before the end of the business day tomorrow.

Our first zig to the south took us by Late Island, Vava'u's only volcanic island. We sailed by it a mile off shore and it looked to be uninhabited. As we approached Late the fish started hitting our lures. First we sailed through a school of mahi. We had eight mahi strikes on our two handlines but we were going more than ten knots at the time and the hooks kept pulling out of the fish's soft mouths. Unfortunately, we can't slow Van Diemen down when a fish hooks up without destroying the sails so we need to deal with the fish at full speed. A few minutes later we sailed though a school of aku. Six strikes later we had two aboard but we don't care for aku so we tossed them back.

At 10PM we got lifted, jybed to starboard tack, and zagged to the north. We've been on that tack ever since, and are now looking at the charts to decide where we want to pass through the Lau Group that marks the beginning of the Fiji islands. The Laus are mostly atolls that stretch north to south between us and Savu Savu. We will be going through after dark and don't want to run into any of them.

A couple of months ago I wrote about the unluckiest flying fish in the world that came down the galley hatch. This morning we met the luckiest flying fish in the world. The boys were messing around in the cockpit and found a plastic quart yogurt container full of water with a live flying fish in it. We use two of those containers to plug our cockpit drains. Somehow the flying fish flew in and ended up in one of those containers that was full of water. He was swimming around happy as can be. I got some video of him in his aquarium before we let him go.

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