Week Eight - Fiji Day

 Another week and another celebration. This time it was Fiji's turn to celebrate independence.

We all headed over to the Funafuti Lagoon Hotel for dinner and the ceremonies. The evening was presided over by the MC Peteli Paulo, who welcomed us all, and the special guest, Mr Teoni Faafou Paape.

There were speeches, then the traditional kava ceremony, ending with the National Anthem and eating the cake.

All hands in mixing the kava

The special guest drinks kava

Two wonderful Fiji Day sponge cakes

Cutting the cake

Watch us sing Fiji's National Anthem

And now the cake.

Traditional kava ceremony explained

View from the roof of the Bowen's bridge looking North

View from the roof of the Bowen's bridge looking South
Panoramic view from the roof of the Bowen's bridge looking West

This week's work has mainly involved preparing for our second barge load of aggregates from Fiji. The Warringa towing the Bowen takes around 4-5 days to get here from Lautoka. It normally makes 4.5-5 knots but during a storm, it was only made 0.5 knots.

Two barges - Bowen on the left

With five trucks it takes us 3-4 days to unload the 4,500 tonnes of stones including 130x1 tonne bags used to separate the different grades of chip.

Bowen barge load of 4,500 tonnes
Unloading begins

The lagoon had four barges within a couple of kms with our barge, Halls barge, the barge left behind by the bankrupt company and another Halls barge towed in just ahead of ours.

Bowen lowering the ramp

Halls dredging barge and abandoned barge

One of the must-do's for us is to consult with the community and allow the public to ask questions or offer advice on how we are doing our work. We have five community meetings and I will be running the last two next week.

Community consultation

I was supposed to include this video a couple of blogs ago but didn't have them joined up.

Watch a video of a drive from the Port to the Airport (6min) and yes, it was hands-free. Rubberbands on the rear vision mirror!

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