Welcome to Zenitude’s blog where you can follow us while we travel slow in our Lagoon catamaran. We update this blog frequently when we are cruising to let family and friends know where we are. Check the complete story of our adventures that started in 2006 when Zenitude became our home and cruising our way of life. Graciela and Oscar

Friday 9 August 2013

Luganville and back to Port Vila

The week in Luganville went flying while enjoying life moored at the lively Aore resort. Staying at one of their moorings you get a bit of resort life, it is good value for money, prices are not too bad. They have a nice swimming pool, a beautiful beach, an excellent restaurant and are very accommodating with any needs you may have. This resort is in the Aore Island just across town of Luganville and has a ferry several times a day to town.
At a mooring in beautiful Aore Resort


The main attraction in Luganville is scuba diving the wrecks from the Second World War that are scattered very close to shore just out of town and the main diving site is the US President Coolidge, a huge cruise ship that was converted into a military carrier for American troops and sunk next to shore after taking the wrong entrance into port and hitting a couple of mines intended for Japanese war ships. Oscar enjoyed 7 dives to several parts of the ship. They are quite difficult dives as you traverse different compartments on the ship and some of them with depths up to 65 meters, therefore, it is advisable to use a good and responsible dive operator. He did all the dives with Allan Power, absolutely fantastic and no doubt we do recommend him to anybody looking to dive in Luganville. Allan has an excellent organization to dive the Coolidge, with very good and experienced guides. They evaluate your diving skills with easier dives before taking you to the difficult ones. Diving the Coolidge was a long time dream for Oscar and he was thrilled he could finally do it. A fantastic experience that if you ask him about it, get ready for hours of story telling.

Diving the US President Coolidge, accessible from the beach

Luganville is the turning point of our trip and from there we started our way back on Wednesday when it seemed that the weather was right for the trip. We decided to take the route on the east side of Malakula Island and sailed a first leg to a very nice and quiet anchorage, Uri Island in Port Stanley, to rest for the night. As Oscar was looking at the mangroves on shore and thinking on a dinghy ride to see if we could get a mud crab for dinner, a local lady on a canoe showed up trying to exchange a grapefruit for a tee-shirt. She said one of her 4 sons could get a 'big' mud crab for us. All enthusiastic she goes back and soon we see a guy going into the mangroves with a bag. Not long after that a live big crab materialized for us and not having the heart to bargain with this poor people we paid market price for it and had a nice crab dinner.

At 6:00 AM next day we left for the second part of the trip. We must have chosen the right window by luck as the weather had little to do with the forecast and we did a very slow and painful first half and a very fast and quite ok second half entering Port Vila at 6:00 AM this morning. Now moored at Port Vila we are having horrible squally weather thinking it is good to be in port. It will be pizza night tonight.

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