After a spectacular evening’s sail, Intention arrived in Port Villa, Vanuatu, this morning about 4:00AM. As it turns out, many of the “aids to navigation” weren’t — at least not at night, with their lights burned out. But, we made it safely past the outlying hazards, using GPS, radar, depthsounder, compass, and two crew on the bow, and then dropped anchor in the quarantine area.
Yesterday, we had a few moderate squalls, with significant rain. We ended up hand-steering the wing-and-wing Intention through the strongest of the squalls, as the autopilot couldn’t quite manage to keep up with the strong, shifting winds. Otherwise, the conditions were perfect — sparkling seas, and mostly clear skies. As we approached the islands, we saw many different types of birds circling overhead.
John earned the “sharp lookout” award, for being the first to spot land: the island of Tanna. Tanna has an active volcano, and we had to do some fancy maneuvering to avoid being hit by the plummeting smoking debris. Well, some of that may be an overstatement, but there *is* an active volcano on the island.
The winds had driven us more south than planned, so we ended up sailing past Tanna, and Erromango, before finally reaching Efate and Port Vila.

As we entered the bay, we were accompanied by a half-dozen dolphins, who cavorted in our bow-wave, leaving sparkling trails of phosphorescence in their wakes. Our friends stayed with us for about an hour, and these dolphins (or different ones?) followed us into the harbor.
Once the anchor was down, we caught a little rest before sunrise, when we hoisted the yellow quarantine flag and waited for the customs inspector to swing by in his skiff. This small chore completed, we are now about to go into town to find some showers. Since today is a local holiday, we can’t clear immigrations today, but we are still allowed ashore, and we will complete the formalities tomorrow morning.
Best Wishes from Intention and Crew!