First day of August. Time is sure flying by now. Only 8 days till we leave for Boston. We are all very excited about the visit, but not the trip itself which will be harrowing. We have a midnight departure, on an airline which is on and off strike every week. Flights are reported to average a 3 hr. delay with some not leaving till 6am. We have (if the flight leaves Fiji on time) a 6 hour layover in LA waiting for the Boston flight, so we will not be totally screwed if there is a long delay for the Fiji flight. Either way, its 10 ½ hours to LA. At least if it leaves on time we can get Jonah to sleep for some of the flight to LA. But because we are flying East and leaving at midnight after 3 or 4 hours the sun will start to rise! And, when we arrive in LA it is 3:30 in the afternoon and the Boston flight leaves at 9:30pm and is another red eye - we arrive in Boston at 6:30am. Two red eye flights in a row basically.

We are still at Mana, relaxing. The wind has been very strong lately so we have not been motivated to go anywhere. And since it has been from the South there will be lots of swell in the anchorages to our North, so we sit. Mana has an enclosed lagoon so is relatively calm in all weather. We had 25k in here the last two days at anchor. Very wet going anywhere in the dinghy. This morning we are just relaxing, doing laundry (well, now that our inverter is fixed the machine does most of the work - we just hang it to dry on the lines), Jonah is playing computer games. We are planning to go to the beach on the North side of the island today and perhaps stop at the resort's pool for a fresh water dip.

We want to be back at the marina where we will leave the boat by Tuesday so we only have 5 more days. Then we will have 2 or 3 days at the marina to get things set up - we have to empty and defrost the fridge and freezer, take all the linens off, tidy up in general, make arrangements for watching our boat - then we depart on Thursday. We hope to go tomorrow up to Waya for a few days. We feel like we have missed so much that we could have seen if not for the repairs, yet we are not overly enthused about rushing about to see other places when we are perfectly comfortable here at Mana! A true dilemma.