Saturday 6th October

Noumea
New Caledonia

22 17.173 S
166 26.266 E

Happy birthday to our favourite daughter; 25 years – where did it all go? We wish you every happiness for the coming year, not long now and we will be home with you. Hugs and kisses from us both.

As we had failed in our attempt to find a water filter yesterday we thought we would try again today, we had a good starting point - we at least knew where the hardware store was. We set off fairly early and made our way directly to the store, it was huge – very similar to Home Depot (groan). We wandered around, found the bathroom fittings and the chemicals for pools but couldn’t locate any filters. In desperation we stopped an employee and went through the agony of trying to explain what we were looking for, 3 employees and much consultation later (they understood us well enough but didn’t know if their store sold what we wanted) we were told that they didn’t have what we wanted but that a store nearby CDSM, or some name similar to that, might have them. I asked about the store that we were told about yesterday, Porcher, but couldn’t find – it was apparently the same place! We got directions thanked the employees and then made our way back to the car with the directions to the next “possibility”. With the new name – just the initials we managed to locate the store (it had Porcher in very small writing at the bottom of the sign too so we knew we had found the right place). It turned out to be a bathroom and plumbing supply store and we had high hopes of success. It took us half an hour to establish our needs and find out that although they had filters they were not suitable for the unit we have on the boat – they were far too big. The kind man there directed us to yet another bathroom / plumbing supply place a couple of blocks away, again we were out of luck - the fittings on their filters were just not right – at this point we were out of options, it was also Saturday morning and everywhere closes for the day at 11.30hrs so we gave up as it was just about closing time by now. So what do you do when everywhere is closed for the day? We headed to the Handicraft marketplace which was opposite the Maritime museum. By chance there just happened to be a huge plumbing and bathroom type show on in the grounds of the handicraft market so we had a quick look for filters there – no luck and then we tried to find our way to the handicraft part – it was closed! By now we had resigned ourselves to a failure of a day! Spotting the Maritime museum across the road we thought we would go and do the museum bit and we spent the next couple of hours browsing amongst the exhibits there, some quite fascinating things but to be honest it wasn’t the best museum we have ever been in. As we left the museum and headed back towards the dock we spied another yachtie – Peter (The SV Yvonne Elizabeth) walking along the road with his sister, Kerry, who had just arrived from Australia for a 2 week holiday, we stopped and gave them a ride back to the dock and arranged to meet up later for a drink. We spent the remainder of the afternoon reading our books until it was time to go to the bar for happy hour. We stopped to collect Peter and Kerry but they were tired (in fact Kerry was sleeping at the time) and took a rain check. Gerry and I had just one drink at the dock bar and then we set off into town to the restaurant we had missed out on the other day – Zanzibar. We were the first diners to arrive at 19.39hrs, and were in fact the only diners until almost 20.30hrs! It was worth going there the food was wonderful, we both enjoyed it. By the time we returned to the boat it was just about time for bed.