Wednesday 26th September

Suva
Fiji

18 07.331 S
178 25.470 E

Today was the day for reinstalling the generator, that meant it was the day for me to make myself scarce from the boat whilst the re installation was underway. Of course we woke to pouring rain - not the ideal weather to go wandering around the streets window shopping. I bagged up all the dirty laundry and amid the pouring rain took the dinghy into the yacht club where I deposited the laundry. Next I took the car into town and after finding a vacant parking meter made my way to the internet cafe where I spent the next hour loading the blog and looking at our emails - I even answered a couple! Having finished with this I made my way back to the car, it was still pouring down, and then headed to the only decent supermarket that we have found. I shopped till I could fit no more into the trolley, it was quite good not to have Gerry peering over my shoulder as I perused the shelves. Once I had finished I loaded the car up - not much space left for anything else, and made my way back to the dock. I then rearranged the shopping into fewer bags and then began the trudge backwards and forwards to the dinghy, loading it with the shoppping. 4 trips later the dinghy was full and in I climbed. I had to bail it out before going anywhere as there was about 4 inches of rain water in the bottom, once that was done I was off and running back to the boat. Gerry came out tied the dinghy up and helped me to unload the shopping. Whilst I had been away he had managed to fit the generator back and had just done the first test run - all seemed to be running well. I didn't ask too many questions about how it had gone - I really didn't want to hear all the problems! Just as Gerry began fitting the casing back into place he dropped a spanner down the back of the engine - to retrieve it would have meant taking the whole Generator out again, needless to say the spanner is still down behind the generator! We stopped for lunch and then Gerry took the hire car back to the office whilst I stashed the groceries away. On his return there were a few more minor ajustments to make to the generator before he was happy with it. We were going to go ashore and collect the laundry at 15.45hrs however the heavens opened just as we were about to take off and it bucketed rain for the next couple of hours, we finally made it to collect the laundry an hour and a half after they were supposed to close, they too were caught by the rain so we managed to get the laundry after all. As there rain began again we had a drink at the bar and then fish and chips in the Wok by the water. As soon as the rain got a bit lighter we bailed out the dinghy, loaded up with the laundry and made our way back to the boat for the night at least we could run the generator and have the fans etc on tonight.