Passage from NZ to Port Vila, Vanuatu

After almost 9 days at sea, we have arrived in Port Vila, Vanuatu...only to be welcomed by too many different exciting and interesting things to bore you all with, so I'll spare you the boring stuff and only post what was cool.
Both lead project boats left pretty much in tandem from Whangarei to Opua on Saturday, the 1st...myself skippering Magic Roundabout since the real skipper was meeting us in Opua (where all boats leaving the country have to clear customs) and Chris and the rest of the crew on Moksha were sailing slowly ahead of us so we could keep up.

^ Magic Roundabout, rainbow and the Poor Knights Islands in the backround

We left Opua the next day, and were in relatively calm seas and actually had to motor for about a day, but once we got about halfway to Vanuatu, the weather picked up dramatically and we were stuck in 4 meter swells with breeze hitting the 40 knot mark. Since the wind was behind us most of the way, we had quite a time surfing down each wave, but once we got to the bottom the bow of the boat smacked into the start of the next wave. Proved extremely interesting for Irene and I up in the bow...there were more than a few times we were slammed awake thinking the boat had cracked in half.

Classic to all Pacific passages, we had plenty of flying fish zooming by along our boat, and had the occassional rogue passenger. This fine young fellow was stowing himself away in one of the winch pockets and literally stinking up the boat to the point where Tristan (a Kiwi crew who volunteered to come along on the passage to help us out with his manpower) searched the entire boat because us women were complaining of a nasty rotten fish smell.

Passages can be quite frightening if you don't plan them correctly or if you have severe weather coming through, or if you get seasick (which I had in Australia). Luckily, I didn't really suffer from seasickness at all this trip, and the worst of the weather was some heavy rain, big winds and swell for no more than 3 days. The scariest thing that happened was when we had some fishing lines out behind the boat....we sailed into a strangely large flock of birds congregating around something on the surface of the water. We all went on deck to see what the commotion was all about, and no more than a meter to starboard of the boat were 3 sharks furiously feeding on what seemed to be some Mahi Mahi...one of which Chris caught and subsequently broke his line. Tristan ended up snagging one of the sharks, but he ended up chomping straight through the line after thrashing about for a few seconds. All I could think to myself was "don't fall in. don't fall in."

^the whole passage crew, minus the canadian grandma who joined as a 'passenger'

So now we are all in Port Vila for the next 2 weeks, training and getting trained, working out logistics, and setting the stage for the rest of the project. Until a few more days.....