Trials, Tribulations, and Results
We had a month between dropping off Sam and Alison at the Savusavu airport and when we would be picking up Channing and Sarah there. Not everything onboard a cruising yacht is fun and easy and we packed a lot of trials, tribulations, and ultimately results into the short month of waiting and preparing for our next guests.
One particularly difficult day stands out when we found out that our new dinghy wouldn’t arrive until well after Channing and Sarah arrived, our website hosting service doubled our price, and the shipping company (Triple B) was going to pay only USD300 for the USD1800 battery they lost. (We wrote about the shipping fiasco in Many Worlds in Majuro and Passage from Majuro to Savusavu.)
Let’s start with the dinghy. The dinghy is a yacht’s lifelline. It takes you to shore to visit villages. It takes you to places to snorkel. It takes you to your friends’ yachts for sundowners. It takes you to get groceries and fuel. Without a dinghy life would be very difficult. We found out just how difficult it is and what wonderful friends we have on one of our buddy boats, Wildflower, whom we first met in April 2023 in Raroia. We woke up in Makogai and started making preparations to sail to our next island, Naigani. One of the tasks is to put the dinghy up in the davits (hoists) above the stern of the boat. Only this morning, the dinghy was gone. Cue sinking feeling in your gut. Then we sprang into action. The wind was blowing straight out the entrance to the bay toward pretty much open ocean and eventually some reefs. Adam and Caeleb from Wildflower went to shore to ask the locals for help. The locals jumped in their longboat and headed out to search. So did Adam and Caeleb. We pulled up anchor and put the wind behind us and headed out to sea, scanning the horizon for our wayward dinghy. Long story short, we didn’t find her and suspect she ended up broken up on the reefs a few miles from the bay.
Jody, Adam, and Caeleb immediately said they would stick with us until we had another dinghy of our own. We were and are so very grateful and we decided to carry on with our plans to visit Wainaloka and for Mike to go to Suva to get some dental work done. We had a wonderful time in Wainaloka, playing frisbee and rugby with the locals, going to church, and hanging out with Kameli, the husband of the local school teacher. His home village on a neighboring island needed a battery for their solar powered electricity set up and they were able to use the battery we used to power our fridge.
We took a deep breath and focused on what we could control (not much) and started sourcing a dinghy and outboard. Fiji has a lot of resources for yachties, but the local shops don’t stock dinghies because they are expensive and come in so many shapes and sizes that it just doesn’t make sense for them to do so. We contacted the biggest shop in Fiji, the Yacht Shop, a big one in New Zealand, Lusty and Blundell, and a manufacturer in New Zealand called South Pacific. All three were willing to work with us and ultimately Yacht Shop in Fiji had the right combination of a dinghy we liked (Achilles) and a local (Suva) super helpful salesperson (Zupeni). It was going to be difficult to get a boat shipped in from Australia to Nadi and then put on a ferry in Suva to Savusavu in less than 3 weeks, but Zupeni said they could get it to us in time for Channing and Sarah’s arrival. While Mike was in Suva to have a crown replaced, he met with Zupeni in person and made a deposit. The website issue was fairly easily sorted with the help of our oldest son and one of his former coworkers who built this hosting service, Bearblog. All it took was about 20 hours of manually moving the posts from old to new and then happily severing our ties with Wix.
Back to the dinghy story. We sailed back with Wildflower to Savusavu and they still agreed to stay with us for the final 10 days of waiting for the dinghy. Except Yacht Shop told me that they weren’t going to make it by the 19th and it would be on the 24th. That would have put a huge damper on Channing and Sarah’s trip to Fiji 2024. After some polite and respectful persuasion, Yacht Shop said they would pay for the FJD500 fee for the customs officials to work on Sunday and we should get it on the 20th. They put the dinghy on the overnight ferry from Suva to Savusavu and we arranged for a pickup to meet us at the jetty. Funny thing about ferries in Fiji is that you need to be there when the ship arrives and walk on and collect your shipment yourself. We figured they would unload the goods and keep them dockside. Our hearts sank with the news. But then we heard that our ferry was going to Taveuni and coming back to Savusavu that night! Good news, indeed.
We verified this with the shipping company and made plans with Adam and Caeleb to take us down to the ferry with the motor that evening. When the ferry arrived, we walked on and there it was! Our new dinghy! I paid the FJD150 shipping fee and the always helpful Fijians helped us carry it off the ferry onto the lawn by the beach. With Adam and Caeleb's help, plus the assistance of a local Fijian security guard, we soon had the new dinghy in the water and underway. And the security guard sorted the very large box disposal for us! Result!
Lesson learned: always ask 4 or 5 more questions about the process when you are in another country.
A quick low-key rant about the battery shipping company, Triple B Fowarders. We gave them a simple task, deliver 4 packages from Long Beach to Majuro, something they say they are good at. As covered before, they hit 75% of the target for us. Then they told us that we were only covered for USD300 of the USD1800 cost of the battery because they don't bother to tell their customers that they are underinsured on the standard form. But wait, it gets better! They "found" the missing battery in Guam. Very helpfully, they were about to put it on a ship to Majuro for us. Since we were in Fiji at the time, (and are in Australia as I write this,) that was less than helpful. Long story short, they are going to ship the battery to our son in Colorado and are eating most of the cost of the fix.
Lesson learned: Don't use Triple B Forwarders if you really need the stuff they are shipping.
The website hosting thing is also just another little rant about business consolidation in the USA. Thanks to Herman at Bear Blog we were able to quickly move the website away from the greedy Wix.
Everything you do when you live on a yacht is an adventure and we're glad we're here!
