Thursday 11th October

Noumea
New Caledonia

22 17.173 S
166 26.266 E

Looking at the forecast it looks like we will be leaving here on Sunday, even so it doesn’t look like being the greatest weather for the trip – I hope that the forecast is a little wrong and that we have great crossing weather – fingers crossed.
Gerry spent the first part of the morning browsing the web sites of mining companies, looking for opportunities; I’m beginning to think he doesn’t want to spend any time decorating and doing up the house for renting out in the near future, never mind I don’t mind if it becomes my project. Once he had had enough of the internet browsing he took off on the bike looking for a computer store; we have a power pack for the computer that works when it feels like it and he wanted to buy a replacement if he could. I read for most of the morning – getting to the last few chapters of my book and then just before lunch Gerry returned with the news that a replacement power pack would take a month to acquire – not a happening thing. We ate lunch and then decided to go to the nearby Museum of New Caledonia where there are 2 floors; the first has a lot of artifacts from the Kanak culture and the second floor has artifacts from the rest of the pacific cultures. We spent a good while browsing and reading about the artifacts; some of the carvings were quite spectacular. Back out in the heat of the afternoon sun we detoured to the marina bar for a coffee and a fizzy water before returning to the boat where we both read for the next couple of hours - I finished my book and then began typing blog notes whilst Gerry examined the backs of his eyelids for light cracks. By the time I had finished trying to upload the recent photos to the blog site it was near to sun set, I grabbed the camera and went up the dock to see if I could get a decent shot of the sun going down over the yachts, there was a great deal of cloud around and the shots weren’t as good as I would have liked but I took them anyway.
As I was about to return to our boat another boat came into dock so I helped them tie up before making my way back to our boat. Gerry was up by this time and had commandeered the computer (he really is a computer hog). We poured a couple of glasses of wine and munched on some cheese and biscuits until it was time to go and buy dinner. We had decided to try another of the Roulettes tonight, again the meal was largely Chinese but we picked different style dishes tonight and enjoyed the meal a little more than the one we had a couple of nights ago. Gerry stayed up and watched a video on war in the pacific whilst I went to bed early and read a book.