Sailing Alone To Fiji on a 30ft Sailboat; A Solo Sailor Enjoys a 622nm Trade Wind Sail to Savusavu

Hello friends, my name is James and this is my 1965 Alburg 30 sloop Tritea. We are on a mission to sail around the world and see as much of this beautiful planet as possible. We're currently working our way through the South Pacific. I can't wait to show you everything we see. With more than 6,900 nautical miles behind us since leaving Los Angeles and making our way through the Hawaiian Islands, French Polynesia, and American Samoa, it was now time to put back to sea and set sail for the legendary islands of Fiji. Hello friends, it's that time again. I have cleared out of American Samoa. We were only here not even, maybe just a week, resting, recouping, making some repairs. It's been very windy while I've been here, so I was stuck on a boat a couple days, but now it's time to sail for Fiji as we are racing the cyclone season, which is quickly approaching. It is like three in the afternoon now, about to haul up, and we have a 700 nautical mile passage to Suva in Fiji. And with the predicted winds, they're going to be following winds and following seas, so we're looking at a five to seven day passage if all goes well, if the forecast holds. So let's get the hook up and say goodbye to Pongo Pongo and make way for Fiji. And we are sailing. I was able to kill the engine pretty quick. We're doing like five knots, which is outstanding, and we'll kind of be on this tack for, I don't know, quite a while. Let me see what the tracker says. Seven miles or something, maybe longer, until we get around the bottom of American Samoa, and then we might have to change our angle. But right now we're sailing pretty. About 10, 12 knots of wind, I think. Kind of big seas, but it's mellow, nice and mellow, and we don't have the engine on. That's the most important thing. Just got us running wing and wing, got the preventer all set up, the headsail pulled out, and everything's bobbling out downstairs. We're doing like four and a half, five knots with the following seas. It's good. This is probably gonna be our point of sail for the next, I don't know, five to seven days. We had a very easy first night on the passage. I don't know, force four winds, maybe 14 to 16 knots. The seas aren't even a meter, or maybe just about a meter at the biggest, but they're very polite. They're not running hard, and yeah, pretty quiet. Nice running sail. Just shook out the second reef so we can get a little more speed, and I've got as much of the headsail out that can go out with the whisker pull on. So we should have, I think, four days of this kind of really mellow sailing downwind, and we are currently 130 miles from the top of Tonga. We're going to be passing one of the northernmost island of Tonga. We'll be passing it pretty close in a day or so, and at this point, we have sailed into the future. We've crossed the international date line that runs on a diagonal between the Samoan islands. I'm not quite sure where we cross it. I don't see any reference to it on my charts. I keep updating the tracker thinking it'll jump a day ahead, but it might wait and do that at 180 degrees. We'll see. Either way, we're definitely in the future at this point, which is something you always have to think about when you're making landfall leaving American Samoa. Even if you're just sailing to independent Samoa, which is like the distance between them is like 30 miles or something. I think it's like 50 to 70 miles to actually get to where you could clear in, but that's a day ahead even though they're only 30 miles apart. And then right now, the weather's saying like come Friday, Saturday, pretty high winds. Really bad low pressure system below Fiji, but some of the models show pretty gnarly winds in the Fijian waters and some show not so much, mostly below. We won't know until we get there, but it's looking at like 25 to 30 knots of wind constant, which means the gusts are quite a bit higher. So that might be exciting, especially once we get in Fijian waters. There's a lot of obstacles. There's 300 islands in Fiji and lots of reefs, so playing a game of, you know, dodge the obstacles in 30 knots of wind will be fun. But we'll just take it as it comes. Looks like there's a little squall on the horizon, might cool us off a bit. Yeah, it's time to get the sunshade up. It's very lovely, but we've got to try to keep out of the sun as much as possible. And I am happy to be on passage. There's a squall approaching. The fresh wind ahead of the squall has arrived and the sea is hissing. We'll see what the squall brings. You never know. Could be nothing and just rain. Could be strong winds and rain. Time will tell. And within minutes it's gone. That's how these squalls work. That one was mellow. There's another one on the horizon. I don't think it'll hit us, but it's like half an hour away. We are sailing over the top of Tonga right now and we are like 12 miles from reefs that are just in the middle of the ocean. I've been watching them all night. I had them, I put, I dropped a pin on the most extreme one that we would get close to and yeah, now we're kind of coming up on them. And I was going to show you guys if we can, we'll see if the Navionics shows up on the video. Yeah, so 12 miles. Turn that off. Yeah, so I dropped this pin to show where the closest reef was and then here's some islands down here. The most northern islands of Tonga and we're like 40 miles from those islands, but those reefs extend out this far up. That's why you always got to zoom in on your chart because zooming out it doesn't show up anywhere on the chart. So you have to zoom way in to see it like it says exposed reef. So that's where we're at. Had a pretty mellow night. One kind of crazy squall around 11. Other than that, it was pretty chill. Kind of white winds last night, but we're doing good. Pushing on for Fiji. We've had a fantastic day of sailing. We've been doing between five and seven knots all day long. Pretty mellow seas. Might not look like in our camera, but as far as sea state goes, it has been very, very polite. The following seas, like that's what's giving us all of our speed. The winds are pretty mellow. I would guess the winds are between 12 and 14 knots from looking at the sea state. So not a lot of wind to play with, but the seas are keeping us in business, which is really, really nice. It is, I don't know what time it is, almost five o'clock on, I think this is day three. Navionics says we have three more days, so we should be in. We're going to be making landfall at Suba Suba, hopefully. And we will be passing another island, which I believe is, this island we'll be passing early in the morning, I think it's part of Tonga. But that's the main thing we're watching out for right now, is making sure we stay off of that. But I believe we'll be passing in the daylight. And then we just push on to get into the Fijian waters. It's been a very, very relaxing passage so far though. Got a decent little squall approaching. I recently wrote on the blog, the tracker blog, that squalls are like ghosts. Because if you look at like the weather forecast for rain, it usually shows like weather fronts. Squalls just kind of like are birthed by the sea and then they return to the sea. They just kind of come up, come by and disappear. Had that little squall earlier, which was unusual because it was like no cloud really associated with it, quite a bit of rain. And bright and sunny, a lot of rain. But this one looks a little more legit. We'll see what kind of winds come with this squall. We are like 190 miles from entering through the pass into Fijian waters. So we'll be getting in there, not tomorrow morning early, but we'll be getting into passing the Lao group the next morning. And we have by 6am today, we had already done 100 miles. So we've been flying, which is awesome. All right, so I'm going to start making tonight's dinner. It's like three in the afternoon, but this takes like two hours to prep. So we're going to start it now. We're going to have which is basically like the South Pacific version of ceviche. It's raw fish that is kind of kicked off with lemon or lime, just like ceviche. And then coupled with coconut milk and vegetables. And then you let it just sit for like two hours. I'd read in cruisers guides to like, try this dish out all over the different islands of French Polynesia, because every place had like a little bit of different take on it. And I did and it was I really enjoyed it. Kind of every place I went, some was better than the others. But and then in American Samoa, it's called okay, I think. Okay, I believe is how they spell it. And they served it very similar but with like, like with I think with a green banana or a cooked banana or something on the side. So we're just going to be making a simple version with what we have. I'm going to use a I have a fresh have a fresh steak, swordfish steak. There's some cruisers in American Samoa from Anders and Annette. Annette's the fisherman and the captain of the boat. She's the one that caught the swordfish and it was as tall as her. But they gave me two steaks from their catch. And I just de-thawed it last night so that we could go ahead and cut it up. Basically, all you do is you cut the steak up into half inch squares, you put it in your tub, you cover it in lime or lemon, and then coconut sauce and then add whatever vegetables you have or want to put in there. And then you just let it sit for two hours. We said that I think they said that this swordfish still got the skin on it. That's how fresh it is. I think she said it was 15 kilos is how big that fish was. It was like they showed me a photo. It was crazy how big it was. And they caught it between the Cook Islands and American Samoa. They have like a really nice freezer on their boat. And they were able to freeze those things solid. They had the whole bottom of their was packed with these steaks. There we go. We're all cut up. Now the only vegetables I have are tomatoes and an onion. So we'll do like half of this onion I think. Got us some little fresh tomatoes that I picked up in American Samoa. It's tricky because everything wants to roll off the cutting board when you're at sea. And sadly, I could not find any limes. I went to three different stores in American Samoa and no one had limes. So we have to use lime concentrate, which is a real shame considering this is like fresh swordfish. It's like, you know, having this like amazing piece of fish and then having to use concentrate. But we're gonna do what we can do. It's all we got the option for. Okay, we got coconut milk. You got to make sure that it's right. Here we go. I'm gonna put our coconut and they say pour it in there till it covers everything. One of the recipes I read said to make sure you stir it with a wooden spoon because of that. I guess metal will react with the acids in the lemon juice, lime juice. So it also says to put it in like a enamel or glass bowl, not in metal. Hopefully plastic's fine because that's all I have that has a closing lid. We need it to close to go in the fridge here because everything's always moving. Okay, there we have it. Poisson coup de la coco or something like that. I can't remember the rest of the French pronunciation. And then you put it in the fridge for two hours and then you eat it chilled. We're gonna eat it over fresh rice. That's how they served it in French Polynesia was like hot rice with the chilled poisson coup. Stoked, stoked, stoked. So we will tune back in when dinner is ready. Fuck. So I just filmed a whole scene of me like putting the rice and the dish and the poisson coup that's finished into the bowl. And I don't think the GoPro is recording. So I'm recording this. So when I check the files, if it's not there, which I'm sure it's not, then we'll have it. I made a fresh batch of rice. The poisson coup sat for two hours. And I have to say, it is fantastic. Really delicious. And super, super easy to make. Tastes just like it does at the restaurant. I really I thought I was gonna screw it up. So if I can prepare this successfully, then you for sure can. This will be one of the main ways I prepare fish that I catch. It's just so easy and delicious. Cool. All right, well, I'm gonna finish my dinner. And yeah, you should definitely try this out. I'll put the name on the screen in case you don't know what I'm saying. Really incredible dish. It has been a very, very squally night and morning. A lot more rain this morning than last night, but very rowdy squalls through the night. It got up at the midnight alarm and shortened sail as we were just like kind of out of control a little bit. And then at the 4 a.m. alarm when I got up, I tightened the pencil sheet down tight and saw a huge squall ahead of us with a lot of lightning. It had missed us and just gone ahead of us thankfully, but there was a lot of lightning in that squall. And this morning it's just kind of this gray dome, steady winds, and a lot of rain. And this is like the weather that had been forecasted so I knew this system was coming. We are currently like 50 miles from entering into Fijian waters and things will get a little more dicey at that point. In one way the seas will be kind of, I think the seas will be kind of brought down, dampened down a little bit by the which is the eastern stretch of islands. I think that'll kind of break any kind of big swells, but there's just going to be islands and coral and stuff to worry about that whole time from then on until we get to Suva Suva, which is it's 100 miles from when we enter the pass to to when we arrive at Copra Shed Marina on Suva Suva. So I'll probably be in the cockpit a lot for that last 100 miles just kind of keeping an eye on everything. But all is well, on board Traitea closing out another passage, pretty easy passage. The boat motion this passage has been very very kind of gentle compared to the Bora Bora passage, which is awesome and I'm grateful for it. And yeah it's time to make some tea and have second breakfast and get back into reading and researching about Fiji. We are completely becalmed in this squall. I try to coax her back. There's like no wind but we're currently pointing south, which is not the way we want to be. Look at that. Since there's no wind the wind vane can't work. In like an hour we're still doing this. I'm just going to start the engine. We have enough fuel to drive the rest of the way. There's another squall there. Maybe it'll have wind. Trying to scull the rudder so that we get pointed at least in the correct direction. If there is any wind it'll get us moving. This is the worst kind of motion too. Like I haven't been seasick, oh that's a big wave, I haven't been seasick since right after leaving Hawaii. I didn't feel good that first passage, first part of the passage when we were beating. And this is the definitely the kind of condition that'll make you seasick. Terrible. Oh there's a little bit of wind, about the breadth of wind. We'll see. We shall see. It's also so wet I couldn't even put the spinnaker up because it would just, it would get so heavy from the rain. With this little wind it wouldn't do anything. There's a little wind, I think we'll be okay. I hate running the engine so we made 138 nautical miles today. It's like 12 30 right now. So our noon to noon was 138 nautical miles, which is like a world record for Triton. She's never done more than 133 so, but it's ironic that it would come right when we got becalmed. And of course now it's blowing a gale. I just laid the tarp down so it would stop flapping. It didn't break. It's got us laid over, bearing the rails with the mainsail completely like paid out and prevented. And the headsail is just like a handkerchief, like I furled it almost all the way in. Has to be blowing, I don't know, gusts of over 38 for sure. Feast or famine. It's been kind of chaotic out here. I reefed the mainsail to the second reef with it pulled out and brought in the headsail and then I went wing and wing trying to get us steering the correct course because right now we're like 17 miles from a reef that we're kind of pointing straight at and I can't get the boat to sail in the correct direction. So I was just getting ready to move the boom to the other side and still wing and wing so at least we're pointing that way. And I discovered we crash jibed earlier when I was adjusting the wind vane and it ripped the, it broke, it broke the secondary winch out of the deck. Well I don't know how bad it is but so you see how, so it broke the bolts and cracked the base and everything. Luckily it didn't just go flying off and smash the solar panel. But even better that it didn't let the boom keep flying and take down the mast. So I gotta ease the main in and get this dealt with. We have some pretty big seas running. I have to get that repaired and probably wait till Fiji, probably wait till New Zealand to repair that one. Now I gotta rig the preventer up on the opposite side. Obviously not grove it to the secondary on the other side but back to the deck cleat. But I gotta go forward and get all that done. Okay well we got the mainsail out on the other side and now we're pointing 240 on the compass which is what we wanted to do. The headsail is doing silly ---- but we'll go see what kind of speed we're doing and then determine what we want to do with the headsail. I might probably just leave it. Oh yeah I probably will. Super good. This should keep us off of that pointing at this big reef because that wind will hit the main and overpower the waves and steer us that-a-way instead of that-a-way. Yay sailing. Yacht life at its best. I can't get the engine to start. I guess I'm going to change the fuel filter and see if that's a deal. I've bled it like three times which is usually the problem. There was no water in the separator. So close damn it. Well uh still didn't get the engine started. I changed the fuel filter, bled the system like 10 times which is usually the issue. Worried about draining the starter battery at this point. We're 119 miles from Suva Suva so I guess I'll just deal with it tomorrow morning. I readied the anchor. I took out the pine plug so that if I need to anchor if we run out of wind and we get near reefs or something at least we can drop the anchor. But hopefully the wind gets us inside and somewhere safe so I can sort this out. Such a bummer. I mean worse came to if we could sail up to Suva I could put the dinghy on the hip and uh drive the boat in that way. But I'm just worried about coming into this area with all these reefs and islands and just worse timing. Such a bummer. Very stressful. Pretty restless night um because I was so worried about the engine and stuff. The winds died off real bad above the outermost reefs of the Lau group and we did like three knots for hours. We finally crawled past them. We weren't in danger. We could have been but we weren't. And uh since we've gotten inside the protected waters of Fiji it's mellowed out a lot and we've had consistent winds all night. And I'm not sure if I get to say land ho when the lands are like behind me um but there's the first set of islands of the Fiji islands I've ever seen. There's a massive island right there like massive massive but it's too stormy to see it. So we'll see if the day clears off we'll see a lot more but we're just crawling our way in we're like 70 miles from Suva Suva. And we are officially in the far east. It does not get further east than where we are at this very moment. Very exciting. We just sailed across the 180th meridian. We're on the exact opposite side of the world from Greenwich, England. And that is awesome. We are currently sailing in the We are 45 miles from Suva Suva. We're bound for Copra Shed Marina. I just spoke to them on the phone. They have a mooring for me. They said they would handle getting all the uh different department people for my clear in tomorrow morning. And that when I got in tonight no matter what time they would have somebody to like catch lines and help me get on the mooring. Might also mean they're gonna see if they can help tow me in. I'm gonna work on the engine a little bit more in an hour or so. We've had just such good sailing wind there's no reason to be running the engine even if I can get it started. I wouldn't be running it right now because we have good wind but hopefully I can get the engine running. If not I'm gonna sail into Suva Suva Bay, drop all sail and get the dinghy in the water and strap to the hip and um get the outboard on and just kind of drive it. Drive Tritea with the little outboard which is six horsepower. It's plenty to drive it as long as I'm not trying to run any races. But it's a little sketch doing that by yourself so it won't be fun. But that's kind of unless I can get in here and they have a tow that they'll give me. Other than that that's what we got to do. I look forward to getting in and tying up to a mooring. I'm gonna stay there a week and just kind of recoup and explore this part of Fiji a little bit and kind of get all my ducks in a row. It was a fantastic passage until the last like 24 hours has been super brutal. Kimberly Wood said via text message she said oh Fiji must have a very high adventure tax. You always got to remind yourself that the hardships are the tax you pay for the magic. I've never enjoyed the sound of an engine more than right now. Finally got it running. Hopefully it stays running. We are like you know 40 something miles away. Home stretch. Home stretch. Our three miles turning into Nakama Creek. Up the creek is uh two marinas. One of which is Koprashad Marina here in Fiji. And we're gonna radio ahead once we get to the mouth of the creek. And they're gonna let us know where we're gonna moor at for the night for the week actually. We're in Suvasuva Bay right now. And as I came into the bay light land breeze came on and smelled like the richness of soil. I mean it was so rich I could have had a handful of wet soil in my hand. That's that's how intense the smell was. Beautiful. First land I've smelled since American Samoa. So that's nice. It's very calm and peaceful. There's a massive storm raging just south of us. So I'm glad we're up here where it's very very still. Getting tied up. Sleeping very deeply. And then tomorrow we clear into Fiji and see everything there is to see. I'll see you tomorrow. I'll come and check in the morning. Okay great. Thank you Kitty. We are safely tied to a mooring in Fiji. And there's hot springs just like pouring into the bay. You can see it's steaming over there. That was Kitty. Nice dude. I got him up out of a dead sleep. I'm glad he put me here at the end of the mooring field because I was like half of these boats don't have anchor lights on. I was like Suvasuva, Copper Shed, Marina, Fiji. Now it's time to sleep. Thanks for watching. I hope you enjoyed this video. If you liked it please give it a thumbs up and leave me a comment. Let me know what you thought. Also make sure you hit that subscribe button so you don't miss any of the future episodes from Fiji. There is so much cool stuff I have to show you. If you enjoy the content on this channel and would like to contribute you can consider joining the Patreon crew. Thanks for watching. Fair winds until next time.