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Timshel - Port Vila, Efate



Most did the 80 mile trip overnight as you had to get in before 16.00 to get moored on the dock at the Yachting World Marina, and the Tour of Efate started at 08.30 on the Monday morning. When we set off from Dillons Bay in the last of the light on Saturday afternoon, there was no wind, but eventually the promised 20 kts plus hit us. By this time we main and yankee set up wing and wing, we reefed down but ended up going far too far downwind with this sail plan and had to be practically closehauled at the end to get to the port. However the tour was well worthwhile, first we went to a Custom village, everyone in traditional dress, ancient lore was explained by the very erudite spokesman (apparently to check whether fish is OK to eat you first see if ants will eat it!), dancing, firewalking, then to the Blue Lagoon swimming place, then he hot springs and mud baths (Most of the WARC women took the mud treatment on the lower leg, but not sure if the rejuvenation worked or not), then a lovely lunch and finally our guides took us through their own very large village. It was good that they were proud to show us their home. Unlike the previous 2 islands, Efate is made of coral not volcanic rock. The Americans had a base there in WW2. Port Vila is a busy, touristy town, the cruise ships come to the dock, the rest of the island seemed to have villages and a few smart gated communities for rich Australians, there are also some resorts. The rest of our time in port Vila (2 days) was spent getting the boat ready, shopping - there is a marvelous produce market and many supermarkets, and for us trying to find enough wifi to activate our Navionics chart card for Australia. In this we were unsuccessful despite trailing round town several times, the download might start but it would have an estimated time of say 6 hrs or 24 hrs and never actually make it. The Navionics person tried to help by sending files via dropbox instead and yellow shirt Galen kindly helped download them to our card but to no avail, it still does not work. When we bought the card they said it just needed a "trivial" amount of wifi to activate, they just don't realise that away from your home wifi, a 500mb download is in no way trivial. So we will have to sail to Australia using the ipad charts and our paper charts, what is so annoying is the precious time we wasted out of our very short stay in Vanuatu.

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