August 21

We pulled out of Port Vila at about 5pm this evening on our way to the Maskelyne Islands on the SE tip of Malekula. We have mostly clear skies with a 8-10k wind from the SSW. The distance to Malekula is about 85 miles and we expect to arrive in the early morning. We are unsure if we will have sufficient wind to sail, or if we will have to motorsail the entire way. At a speed of 5.5k we will take about 16 hours to reach our goal putting us in at about 9am. We don't want to go too much faster as we do not want to make landfall before the sun is well up. Preferably we want to be about 10 miles away from land when the sun rises. This gives us plenty of time to make our approach.

It is now midnight and we have about 50 miles remaining to reach the Maskalyne Islands. The wind remains light at 5-8k from the South and is almost directly behind us. We are motorsailing (motoring with the sail up) at about 5k on a course of 333M. The seas are calm with a 2ft swell from the South or SSW and the sky is mostly clear (plenty of stars).

At 3am we have about 35nm to go. Conditions remain the same with light wind from the SSW and calm seas and slight swell.

At 6:30am we are now about 12nm from the Maskalyne Islands. The sun is up and it looks like a beautiful day is in the cards. At dawn we deployed our usual fishing line on our saltwater rig with a pinkish squid lure. We also put out a 125lb test line with a rubber snubber at the boat end and a marauder lure at the other. Reports from "Valere" that they caught two fish in this area have us stoked that we may have good luck as well. This is the first time we have deployed a hand line. We have never done so before as I have some qualms about how to pull in a big fish hand over hand (wearing gloves of course). The rig (with Penn International 50SW on a nice stiff rod) has always worked great for us and seems far simpler. We shall see. Hopefully if we do hook up it will be on the rig, though I would love to see how it goes with the hand line, I would hate to lose a fish so hooked due to operator inexperience.

At precisely 9am we dropped anchor behind Awei Island. The anchorage is flat calm, we are protected from all sides from swell and from 3 sides from wind. The weather remains fine with about 30% cloud cover. The reefs in this area look wonderful and friends aboard "Valere" report excellent snorkeling. There were 4 or 5 dugout canoes here when we arrived and we were immediately surrounded by them. They are very quiet and polite and offered us vegetables and mud crabs which we had to decline having stocked up well in Port Vila just yesterday. There are 3 other boats in the anchorage, amazingly, all American. "Valere" of course, out of the LA area, a boat called "Wind Runner" from San Francisco and another Seattle boat we have never met named "Toucan". Just like home.