S 18° 37.123,
W 174° 12.281

The above position is the position where I start writing a narration.

Yes, we are out of Vava’u and on direct course to Fiji, which is at 284 deg ahead of us.

The wind is not the strongest. We started early in the afternoon with 10 KN TWS sometimes it goes down 8 – 7 to climb up again to 10 – 11 KN.

In these winds we are sailing comfortably with around 2.5 – 3.5 KN. No 10, 11, and 12 KN as on the way from NZ to Vava’u, but also not 4 – 6 m waves rolling on out PRT side.

Today MaRe swings gently in a swell of a meter coming from about NE.

A bit more speed would be nice a make day distances of 120 – 150 NM. Let’s see if the wind will follow the forecast.

I set only the genoa to give Joe a chance to adjust again. Should we have tomorrow after sunrise such a wind, I’ll set the Big Blue to let the 123 m2 pull. (The genoa had only 49 m2.) After sunset, which is today at 1815, the Big Blue can’t stay up for safety reasons.

Back to departure.

In the early morning I wanted to start the genset. It didn’t start. When l switched the main security switch to off – on, I felt already that something inside the switch was broken. Why, I don’t know. I installed this switch only in 2022, while I was in Panama.

Quickly opened a part of the genset enclosure and pulled out the cables to the switch. A cable bridge and it was running perfectly fine again. As I had a very similar switch on board, I replaced it. Took me about an hour and all was back to normal.

Docking MaRe at the custom dock was a bit tricky today because nobody was at the dock who could take our lines and put them around bollards. Very smoothly I approach the dock with the big wall mounted rubbers for cargo ships, and Joe went ashore, I gave her the line, she put it around the bollard and I adjusted the line the way that our fenders hit the big rubbers. A stern line fixed and MaRe was docked for outbound clearance.

We went to the open customs office, where a friendly lady officer was on duty. We know each other since last year October when I came the first time to Vava’u.

I had to fill in for the 6th time the same document… And a few more. At just 1210, the lady who collects the fees wanted to leave for her lunch break. The customs officer asked her to first proceed with my payment. She smirk l smiled and went back into her tiny office and I could pay about 3 – 5 Euro customs fees.

I gave Joe the rest of the money I had. She went to the market place and bought fruits and veggies for the rest.

Myself I went back to the custom office and we said farewell to each other. It was a moving moment. Sailor’s fate!

Back to MaRe I activated Starlink to exchange up-download messages an emails.

To my surprise I had already the quotation for the parts I need for the watermaker. Thus, I paid this from my German bank account so that Nicolas of Dessalator can ship the parts to the Niwa marina in Savusavu. He also noted that DHL will get the parts there with in a week to customs. Now I hope that the marina staff will help to get them out quickly. Then it will take me half a day to assemble all. Thereafter I’ll be very happy again. But let’s see when the parts arrive.

Thereafter, I wanted to set my tablet with a WLAN connection to the Axiom chartplotter when I saw that my tablet doesn’t connect to my Axiom’s WLAN. That this works I could verify with my mobile phone and also with my PC. To make it short, only when the Starlink is fully off, my tablet connected to the Axiom’s WLAN. I was extremely happy and joyful during the time I tried all kinds of ways to get my tablet connected to the Axiom’s WLAN.
As the Android system does not allow prioritization of WLAN connections, the needed connection only worked when Starlink was off. I also can imagine that somewhere in the Starlink is a push mechanism that Starlink gets promoted and other strong networks get suppressed. I love my Linux PC where I can assign to each WLAN connection a priority value. This would have avoided the problem I had today just before departure.

We are still sailing with around 3 – 3.7 KN and hope the wind increases to 15 – 20 KN.

I activate Starlink every 6 h, 0600, 1200, 1800, and 2400 to up-download messages & emails. Deviations are possible.

As I got done question about the new track, hereb is the link again:
https://share.garmin.com/P435