During the skeg repair, I hurt my back lifting the rudder in and out of the boat. By the time the boat was back in the water I was in constant sciatic nerve pain. Several trips to the doctor and a chiropractor and I began to improve.

Then, while climbing off the boat one day, I slipped and stuffed my foot into a stanchion, suffering a nasty compound fracture to a toe. We went to the small local hospital but after taking X-rays they told us they could do nothing for me and that I should return to the States to have it fixed. Rhonda, a nurse, cleaned and closed the wound with Steri-strips and splinted the toe the best she could. After two weeks on antibiotics the wound was closed without infection, a big risk in the tropics. Two months later, the bone was healed, though crooked. Altogether, it was an excellent outcome even so.

Bad luck comes in three’s, so they say, so we should now be done with that stuff. By now, though, we were well into the hurricane season, so we decided not to risk a sail to New Zealand but spend the season in Fiji instead.

The upside of this decision has been all the new friends we’ve made. The Fijians are the happiest, friendliest people we have met. They are very quick to smile and laugh and are pleasure to be around. Also, the Vuda Marina and staff have made us very welcome. Their facilities are wonderful and very self-contained, including a cafe, restaurant/bar, chandlery and grocery store. Our favorite things are the movies on the “yacht club” lawn three times a week and the band on Sunday afternoons.

We’ve also gotten to enjoy the beautiful cruising and now quiet anchorages of Fiji, some of which are normally packed with cruising boats during the dry season. We’ve also gone SCUBA diving with Subsurface Fiji and enjoyed the spectacular coral and offshore islands.

Our plans are to sail from Fiji to the Marshalls in August by way of Tuvalu and Kiribati.