S 18° 06.519
E 178° 23.711

I am still writing on my narration about Makogai Island and it’s wonderful people.

A lot of time I had to spent on my new mobile phone. I always have highly customized Android phones and Linux PCs. The new phone was necessary because my old Huawei’s screen turned slowly but steadily black. I could complete all just in time before the screen could not be read anymore. Just a few files I still need to transfer from my PC on to my new phone.

As a lot of settings are different from my old phone, the setup took quite some time. To find settings faster, I used Claude AI. Pretty good for such work.

What also takes a lot of time is training the keyboard to understand my swipe typing. This slows my text creation quite a bit down these days.

I also was 3 times in Suva downtown for some shopping. The bus ride is fun. All kind of people are getting on and off. At the bus terminal the surrounding streets are crowded by cars and people. Suva is a bustling city. What you don’t see on the islands but here are begging people sitting on the street. A sad thing which I haven’t seen for a long time.

As about 50 % of the population is Indian origin, the melange on the street is very nice. The jobless rate is said to be high which reflects on the streets, or in bars.

In Suva I got among other things a new stainless steel bowl for making the dough for our bread. My glass bowl broke during the very bumpy ride from NZ to Tonga. Joe broke the glass bowl for brewing tea. For this only got a stainless steel pot, which works.

Although I started already a few days before I could do a big chunk of work for the routing of the next long sail in Fiji today. Basically I’ll sail counter- clock wise around Viti Levu and visit the islands along the way. You will see on the tracking eye we’ll go to.

On Sunday Tom, the Fijian fishing boat sailor who stops by at MaRe every morning, took me to his home village about 2 h bus ride on way. Also about this day I’ll catch up again

Last night he came to me with a special request. I should write a letter for him. The Suva port authorities threatened to buck him heavily because one of his fishing boats sits on a reef since the last cyclone paid a visit to the area here. Also his other 5 boats, which are at a big mooring buoy are threatend to be bucked as well. After listening to his story, I wrote, very early this morning, the letter he had asked me for the night before. The printout will be done in a typing shop, not in printing shop. A different world in days, where everyone is expected to have a PC but most people only have a mobile phone.

Now I’ll upload this narration and then go to bed. I’m tired…. is what I wrote, but then I “died’ before I could do it.