How I ended up talking to the police with margarine on my bum

(Sorry that the blogs are a little out of order here. I still have another Tonga one to go but I’m going to cheat and jump ahead to Fiji)

We have been in Fiji for a couple of weeks now and have had quite an interesting time. Our first stop was a lovely little town called Savusavu where we met some amazing kids from the local yacht club. It’s a town that has tried to centre itself around sailing and has made it so any child who wants to learn to sail can, free of charge. As a result of this, Fiji’s four entrants into this year’s South Pacific Games all come from the Savusavu Junior Yacht Club. In an area of the world where there are often few opportunities for young people, we think this is really brilliant. I won’t write about this in any more detail though because I am writing an article on them for Cruising Helmsman magazine (everyone rush out and buy it!) and they don’t like publishing anything that’s already online.

From Savusavu we have traveled around a number of lovely bays (photos to come), done a bit of diving, met some awesome locals and failed miserably to catch any more fish. Though Paddy has created a couple of lures out of an empty Speights can (apparently fish go for blue) so we’ll see how we go with that.

For the past couple of days we have been anchored by a resort near a town called Labasa (pronounced Lambasa) and yesterday we hit the town in search of supplies. Labasa is a busy, dusty little town with Bollywood music blaring out from most of the shops. Like Savusavu there is a big Indo-Fijian influence with bright coloured clothes, saris and general tackiness aplenty (so of course I was right at home!) But by the end of the day we were sweaty, dusty and a little over it all – even I was tackyed out.

Our transport to and from Palmlea resort was a bit of a comedy of errors too. What was meant to be a bus was replaced by a minivan that had to take us all in several trips. This was all well and good in theory, but in practice a little challenging. Labasa township is an extremely bumpy half hour drive from the resort. An enhanced rainy season meant repair works on the roads weren’t able to be done so a big chunk of the road is rutted muddy track. There were eight people per trip, which was fine on the way there, but each of those people hadn’t seen a town for a while and were provisioning their boats so the return trip – loaded up with people, groceries, diesel and everything but chickens and goats – was a little cosy. Add to that the fact that we had to wait for an hour when we were done for our driver to pick up supplies for the resort and the whole thing was rather character building.

Our driver was amazing though, nothing seemed to phase him – he went back and forth, filling jerry cans with diesel and petrol and getting the money from us after, and all on a flat rate.

Unfortunately, after being left in a hot van for an hour, some of our groceries were a little worse for wear and our margarine had turned into soup. It also didn’t help that I, while trying to prevent a queue backing up behind us at the supermarket, helped our rather slow grocery packers by stuffing the margarine into a string bag instead of putting it in plastic. This of course was a recipe for a margarine explosion – which happened quite spectacularly pretty much as soon as we got it on the boat. We had margarine coating the mainsail sheet (actually a rope -don’t ask me why they call it that. sailors are weird), all over the cockpit floor, down the stairs leading into the boat and – unbeknownst to me – all over my bum. I couldn’t work out why every time I sat down to clean up a patch more of it got spread around!

Then the police turned up. Diane kindly pointed out that my rear was covered in dairy product, but by then it was too late – they were already on the boat. We have seen a lot of police in Fiji. At pretty much every little bay we have stopped at the local constabulary has turned up to check us out, get our details and find out where we are going. We now have printouts of our crew list and details that we can just hand out to them, which makes the whole process much easier. John and Lynn from the Island Cruising Association say this it the first time in all the years they have done this that there has been such a heavy police presence. The police told them it was to ‘keep us safe’ but we haven’t felt unwelcome or unsafe for a second since we have been in Fiji – the people have been absolutely lovely. We suspect it is more of a way of letting us know they are keeping an eye on us and since we have absolutely no intention of causing any trouble I am pretty sure we will be fine (though in the interest of harmony I shall refrain from tackling Fijian politics in here). The police that have visited us have been polite and friendly and the guys that boarded after the margepocalypse looked quietly embarrassed to be standing their while we were scraping the stuff of the boat. I myself was trapped – I couldn’t go downstairs because everywhere I went I spread yellow goo, I couldn’t sit down for obvious reasons and I certainly wasn’t going to down-trow in front of the police! So I was left hovering around the cockpit like an idiot, trying not to turn my back on the police, while Paddy sorted out the paperwork.

It was rather embarrassing but we had a laugh afterwards and we managed to get the marg off everything (including myself) so no harm done.

The next leg of our travels will be around the Yasawa island chain, which hosts a series of volcanic islands, beaches and lagoons. It is a bit off the tourist beaten track and, though it is more accessible now through a catarmaran/ferry service, it is still a part of the world that many people never get to see, so we are really looking forward to checking it out.