11/15/2009, Enroute to New Zealand
Our sail to Minerva Reef went exactly as we expected .heavy winds on the beam stretched taught the jib sheet, the main being lowered to the second reef. Larger waves splashed spray over the deck adding another layer of salt as the water evaporated. What a mistake removing some of the teak hand rails to install not so stainless hand rails. Salt water and painted wood is a much compatible than salt and bright steel which quickly turns yellow and drips the discoloration onto the white deck. Moving at 7.5 knots, it was a remarkably comfortable ride with not much of a heel to the boat. Moving at this rate our ETA into Minerva was deceptively soon. It is amazing how on a long passage one knot or even a half knot of boat speed can greatly affect an arrival time into a destination. But like a runner who starts out strong and gradually looses his wind, so did Brick House. For 24 hours Brick House continued its fast showing on the 255 mile trip then began to fade. When 95 miles north of Minerva, the wind died to a light puff and Brick House dragged it feet.
We sailed in close proximity to Sam on "Yanti Perazi" and some other boat we could see on the RADAR the entire time, with our running lights staying equidistant throughout the nights. Rather than the midnight arrival we first expected, it was 9 AM when we made our approach to the white foaming breakers on the north side of the circular reef of Minerva. There is no land at Minerva, which apparently eliminates it from being called an atoll, only exposed rocks and bare reef at low tide
A few miles outside of Minerva, we started to see masts, and hearing boats hailing each other on VHF. We were speaking to Sam on VHF, and then we got a call from Migration who could hear us talking and knew we were approaching. They asked us if we got the email. I explained that we had not gotten email in a few hours because it became apparent late yesterday that we would not arrive at night after all. They patiently waited for me to justify why I hadn't checked email, and then announced that they had sent an email saying we had to get here this morning because they were getting married at NOON today!
After congratulating them over and over again, we pushed up the throttle to full RPMs to get in so we could start preparing an appetizer, get our snorkeling gear out for the reception, and think of a gift! I felt like FLYING across the huge atoll .I was soo happy and excited for them! They had gotten engaged 2 days before when Alene picked up a corked bottle which happened to be floating by. The weathered message inside said "Will you marry me?". There was a boat with 2 captains who had done another wedding in Surrarow atoll this winter, on another boat. When they fly home in 2 or 3 weeks they will bring their paperwork and their whiteness list of which there were many, to the registers office and make it all official, just like when you get married at home.
Tied behind Migration were 10 or 12 dinghies which bounced in the little wavelets as the ceremony got underway on the bow. Alene had on a flowery pink, red and white sundress, with a festive pearl necklace she had borrowed. She was 100% a blushing bride! Bruce was robed in a tasteful tropical shirt with elegant matching shorts, and was smiling from ear to ear. IN fact he never stopped smiling the entire day. They exchanged their vows, and their very long kiss, and were pronounced husband and wife. Many of us in the audience were tearful remembering our own wedding days, and rejoicing in this wedding. A champagne toast ensued, and then we got underway to the reception. Migration, a big red trimaran, their home, carried us to the pass a few miles away, where we anchored and all went snorkeling. Some brought spearguns, since lobsters were the only item on their registry, and most just dressed in heavy wetsuits and admired the most spectacular coral we have seen to date. A few big shy fish, but no lobsters. Patrick came back to the boat with a small grouper, and like a very bitchy wife I exclaimed that I wanted no more fish only lobsters. Our freezer is still pretty packed with fish but Patrick hates getting skunked so he had to bring me back something. Kind of like a hunting cat bringing a mouse home for mom and dad. Its not like he wanted to eat it he just wanted to play with it.
A sailboat came in to the pass while we were all snorkeling. It must have been quite a site to come in to a pass where you wonder if anyone will be there, and you see bobbing snorkellers and a half dozen dinghy floating on both sides of the pass! SO much for a desolate atoll
Back on the boat, Migration had warmed a hundred gallons of hot water for us all to rinse off and warm up with. They have a shower on the back of the boat so everyone took turns filling their wetsuits, stripping out of the wetsuits and then running under for a few more drops of hot water. After 19 people had taken hot showers, there was only 12 gallons of water gone! Only sailors could be so frugal with water!
Two beautiful cakes were made for the wedding, and after Bruce and Alene did the cutting and feeding of the cake - too kindly may I add - we all feasted on cake, and made our way back to the anchorage on Migration. Bruce and Alene opened our homemade wedding present - a book that I had quickly pasted together for them as we were coming to the anchorage. It was a story of their life - how they met, what they liked about each other, all the fun things they do together they seemed to really appreciate it. The party continued for hours in to the night. When we finally left at 1230am, we crashed in to our beds and slept very very well. We had finally arrived at Minerva Reef!
The next 6 days were spent scouring the reef for lobsters. Day time snorkeling, night time reef walking led us nowhere. Today we found out that a lobster boat had been here 2 weeks before us and had cleaned out the reef. They didn't kid around. There is not a single lobster here to even look at, never mid eat. Maybe they are down at 50 feet or something but down to 30 feet or so they are gonzo! No one, on the at least 20 sailboats which have recently come and gone, have caught any lobsters. There aren't even that many fish to eat. If you HAD to survive here, it would be very difficult. It would be a lot of hard work every day to eek out a sustenance. It's not the aquarium we had hoped for. We are starting to wonder if the entire world is fished out.
We head out in the morning to go to South Minerva Reef, about 20 miles south of here. Fewer cruisers go there by far, but there is a commercial boat there right now, capturing sea cucumbers a nicer sounding name for sea slugs. The pendulant, absolute last in line bottom feeder which very slowly slithers over a sand bottom picking up waste from the sand and filtering it. If these things were good to eat, don't you think every other fish out there would be picking them up? When there is absolutely nothing else commercially viable to catch, you pick up gooey sea slugs, slit their sides, remove the snot thick entrails then send them to China..
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11/06/2009, Posted from South Minerva Reef
I don't know if our boat is moving faster, or our brains are moving slower, but its proving difficult to keep current with this blog. So I'm gonna try to catch up because as wee sit here in Nukalofa, Tonga, ready to depart to New Zealand, our blog shows us in Savaii, Samoa, still!
Our days on Savaii were very nice. One day we took a bus with another young cruising couple Steve and Ydine on the yacht Pomoki, to a waterfall that was mentioned in the guide book. It turned out to be the most beautiful waterfall we have seen and it gets the overall designer award. . Beautiful clear blue swimming pool at the bottom of a powerful fall, not a mighty forever tall fall but tall enough to thunder into the clear pool. You could dive from the rocks behind the curtain of water directly into the fall and receive a full body slam into the torrent below. Strange fun. Around the circular perimeter of the huge round pool were many small fallettes. Sitting against the shorter vertical rock wall with your back to the chosen fallette, you may determine the intensity of the backrub, massage, you now snuggle into. Green ferns and dripping moss growing at the surrounding cliffs complete the idyllic picture. The 4 of us took hours to explore and soak up heat from the sun baked hot rocks then immerse again into the cool waters.20
After getting our fill of waterplay, we followed pig trails to an ancient Polynesian pyramid like mound. You ask what is a pig trail? Well, they are skinny little paths worn through thickets and tall grass by pigs on their daily forage for food. The trails often have many forks, and they often lead to piglets hiding in the bushes who go squealing off when you get close scaring them and you half to death! There is no destination involved in these trails, but knowing generally what direction we wanted to travel, they did ease the bushwaking process tremendously. The fifty foot high terraced mound was tremendously impressive realizing all the rocks were delivered and stacked individually by hand. The early Polynesians had no backhoes or wheelbarrows. There is one other similar mound in Tonga. It is thought these mounds were built over a thousand years ago for burying people and for ceremonies which could include sacrifices to the gods. From the top of this mound the view was across the valley to the ocean. Sitting under a huge mango tree on top of the mound, it gave us a nice rest after our swim and work out of pig trailing. As we sat, butterflies the color of the sky and of plums twittered around the flowers, and a fresh ocean breeze dried our sweat from the long hike up. The pig trail hike back was even more of a workout since we went in circles chasing wild pigs and finding our way out late in the day, worried about how we would get the 25 miles back to the boat! Luckily, after hiking all the way back out to the main road, Ydine worked her charms with a passing taxi to arrange an economical ride back to town where we picked up the dusty and colorful bus which eventually rolled us back to the anchorage. Loud bass music kept us awake on the way.
Another day, Patrick and I hitchhiked to the other side of the island to see a few more tourist sites. The sites were very simple wouldn't even qualify as a scenic rest stop in most countries but the trek there and back wasn't so simple.
An eight year old girl led us barefoot down a well worn path to see the lava tube. The lava tube is a long air bubble which developed under hot lava. Eventually the lava cooled and the two ends of the tunnel collapsed allowing a person to walk through the long arch. These tourist sites are on family owned land, in peoples backyards, and are the simplest things you can imagine. It's a good thing we weren't expecting anything like we saw at the island nation of Niue. I remembered again for the umpteenth time why I love Patrick so much. Despite having forgotten to take but a few dollars with us, Patrick agreed to follow me further away from the boat to see every last site listed in my guide, until we had to hitchhike back on a road where it seemed only one car a day travelled. We walked down the steamy road looking for mangos and bananas in the trees, and splitting open coconuts for drinking. Patrick has gotten pretty quick as opening coconuts for me even without steel tools. Some men bring flowers to their ladies - Patrick brings coconuts and when he can find them, lobsters. Much better than flowers! The other sites we saw that day were a Catholic church built of rock and mortar but too near the ocean. It was nearly flattened by a hurricane. At a nature preserve, we climbed a long wood stairway spiraling up a huge banyan tree. The aerial walk at the top extending to another tower was far too rotted to walk on. There wasn't much to look at across the tops of the trees so we sat on the platform and ate our snack of a lunch. On the long walk back to the main road after stumbling on a pile of human bones and skulls in a deserted burial site, we got lucky and got that one car who brought us to the main road where a bus was coming soon. Only a 2 hours wait till the next bus. But wait, our luck got even better. A woman stopped and let us climb in to the back of her pickup truck for a bumpy, breezy half hour ride back to the anchorage. , and we were "home" again before we knew it.
Another day we rented bikes, and rode to another simple tourist site - a church that had lava in it, a grave of a virgin which lava flowed around because she was so holy and pure, and a small village around a crater. Now, they say the lava flowed around the pure "virgin" but somehow the locals telling this story completely miss the point and fail to explain why the church was so filled with hot lava. Actually, in defense of the church, the grave must have given off a lot of gas because when the small lava tube bubble collapsed, the grave was somewhat exposed 4 feet below the top of the lava flow. Much further down the road, at the village built around a small shallow crater a 12 year old boy began asking for money. He seemed puzzled then annoyed when Patrick only spoke Spanish to him. As we rode our bikes out the gates, the kid began throwing rocks at us. Patrick playing the bully, with a smirk, stopped his bike, picked up some rocks then jumped back on his bike riding quickly after the kid which made him take off like lightening. It was a gesture to protect future "palongies" visiting the area. I guess that site needs to be taken out of the tourist guide! Now we can say that we have gotten stoned in Savaii!
The island of Savaii is very rural, quite different from Apia. Eventually we bid farewell to our friends Ydine and Steve and we set sail for Tonga.
The wind was from the south, so we were driven more westward than we had hoped. Just as the wind changed to put us on a favorable course to Vavau, a boat on Niuatoputapu (or in English cruisers language, New Potatoes), the northernmost island in Tonga, heard us on the VHF radio and encouraged us to come in there, if even for just a few days, to help with the tsunami clean up effort. We were happy to stop beating against the wind and it sounded like our help would be appreciated so we hove to until morning and came in early the next day.
What complete devastation Houses washed away, clothes washed away, scared dogs, pigs, and people wandering the street nervously and bewildered. We worked for 2 =BD days cleaning sand, broken glass, ants, rocks, palm trees and personal belongings out of the nurses home. I worked for a half day or more running our dinghy back and forth from the various cruising boats that had come in with supplies for the island. Our clothes were ruined, our bodies tired and bruised, and our minds blown by what these people had gone through. Many were still up hiding in the hills long after we left the island, as tsunami warnings continued through the week. We listened to stories of the tsunami from some very sane Tongans, and some of the memories of the earthquake and tsunami were a little unreal. Some remembered the earthquake itself as lasting for a constant 20 minutes. Some remember the clanging of metal being louder than thunder. The Tongans believe that if you clang on anything metal after an earthquake, it will ward off the ensuing tsunami. I guess it didn't work so well this time. Some remembered running and running for the hills, trying to collect their children as they went. Others remember loved ones that are no more. One morning Patrick spend several hours with our dinghy helping some locals by towing the roof of their house back to a location near the town dock as it had been blown a mile down the coast. We could not spend more than 3 days in Niuatoputapu as we had to catch up with the yacht Dosia, in Vavau, 160 miles to our south. Dosias dinghy, which had gone astray at Beveredge reef, after 25 days had washed up at Niue, loaded on a cruising boat and delivered to Dosia. Dosia was ready to leave and we had to catch up with them before they set out for New Zealand.
The island group of Vavau, Tonga is not my favorite place. Many cruisers like it because of the very calm and protected anchorages. I guess I didn't like being in a town that wouldn't even be a town at all if it weren't for cruisers and a few stray tourists. Too contrived or something. Plus the ocean water was again cold and uninviting, the wind blowing hard. All the things we headed to warmer latitudes to escape were still present on our return. This time in Vavau, we cruised to the furthest out islands in search of lobsters and fish for our spear with dismal success. Even the local fishermen are spearing tiny reef fish and collecting not lobsters but the very bottom feeding sea slugs which are sent to China. There is little left on a reef system when the main harvest is sea slugs.
Sam on Yanti Perazzi was returning soon to his boat from the States. With him he would have our new freezer, temperature probe and while in Pago Pago, we took delivery of his alternator part. Bruce and Alene on Migration came in a few days after our arrival- friends we had not seen since the Marquesas. We gathered bread and veggies for our trip onwards, and set off 10 days later for the southern Hapaai group. Yanti Perazzi and Migration will join us in a few days at some undetermined destination south if all goes as planned.
Leaving Vavau we were blown more westward than we had hoped and made our landing at Ofalanga Island in the Hapaii group rather than the intended Haano. Wearing two layers of wetsuits we snorkeled the clear water looking at the colorful coral but little else. It is suppose to be a day anchorage there, but we stayed almost a week exploring the reefs and the island. Nothing to write home about. The fish were extremely shy, and not abundant. We saw a few different species of sharks, and enjoyed the Mahi Mahi that we caught on the way in. Sam emailed that he was on his way, and Migration emailed that they decided to go straight to Tongatapu, the island where Nuka A Lofa is located.
Sam arrived and after a day or two, we left to go eastward. We had a perfect sail in flat water, and 10-15 knots of wind, and sailed in to Foa Island. A nice anchorage with not a lot to do. I enjoyed spearfishing here, but didn't get anything. It was probably the most beautiful coral I had seen in Tonga, and there were many tropical fish and a few small snappers to shoot at. The fish were too small to interest Sam or Patrick so I had the hunting grounds to myself. The fish were so shy here though, that moving my fin the wrong way spooked them!!!
We sailed on to a few more anchorages together after that none of which were that interesting and finally in Nomuka iki. While sailing, Patrick hooked a Mahi Mahi but he got the biggest fish we have ever gotten on Brick House a 5 foot tall Wahoo that had to have weighed 60 pounds! We have been eating him ever since and will continue to do so for weeks! We are giving fish out to anyone who will take some, and eating it almost every meal!
Sam departed soon after arrival to Nomuka after another delicious shared meal, for Tongatapu frustrated that we couldn't find any good spearfishing and disgusted with the grey cold weather. Patrick and I left the next day to Kelefesia- the place I looked forward to the most- but upon arrival, we saw it was untenable. Rollers that surfers would enjoy were in the anchorage so we made a 180 and sailed on to Tongatapu- Nukalofa. We spent most of the night heaving to outside of the harbor, and arrived at around 8am in to the anchorage where 11 other boats waited for departure to New Zealand. By the end of the second day here, we are down to 9 other boats. Other boats are talking about leaving tomorrow. I wonder if we will be the last boat of the season to arrive down in New Zealand!
SO after some boat chores, and getting some veggies and bread and eggs, we will depart for the very desolate Minerva Reef hopefully by this weekend. Then we will wait for a good "weather window" to New Zealand. I'm trying to not get too worked up about weather between here and New Zealand. SO we will get to Minerva Reef, and then worry about the rest. We wont spear any fish there our freezer is full of Mahi Mahi and Wahoo. But Lobsters - that's a different story altogether!
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