Sailing Faith: The Long Way Home

Excerpt: Once in the lee, we use the motor and headsail to calmly motor toward the village of Neiafu. There's something in the water, a change in the wave pattern or an eddying wind a quarter-mile away. Then they surface. I holler, "Whales! Come up here and look at this!" Three humpback whales, nearly the size of Faith, cross our bow and surface within a boat length, then wave their tails and disappear.

I hope you enjoy this fourteenth chapter from my book, Sailing Faith: The Long Way Home. Please visit www.faithofholland.com to purchase the complete book with 15 maps, and a 24 page color insert of 85 photographs. You will not be disappointed. I guarantee it.



Sailing into Tomorrow

Aside from the blahs of the first few days, the passage starts well. The sun shines for added bonus. We lose a fish, a lure, and all of the line on the reel to something that splashes only once. I almost lose the rod when the rod holder breaks while I'm fiddling with the reel. It about yanks me over the top of the dinghy we keep suspended on Faith's transom during passage.

We go to Tonga instead of stopping at any of the atolls along the way. Feeling crummy for the first days of every passage makes us rethink how many passages we want to start.

After we pass Palmerston Atoll, Emily takes a call on the radio and hands the microphone to me. "Hello, this is the sailing vessel two miles northwest of Palmerston. Who's calling please?"

"My name is Simon. I live on the atoll, and want to know if you are to stop here."

"We are going to Tonga. It looks very rough with many breakers in your anchorage."

"Ok, I just want to say hi. If you like, I will help you anchor. I'm just checking."

Lorrie is touched. She just finished reading about Palmerston, and wonders if we made the right choice. Looking at the breakers in the anchorage, I know we did.

During the comfortable numbness of a late-night watch, the weather turns. The wind rapidly shifts from eight knots out of the north to thirty knots out of the south. The world acquires clarity when this happens. After trimming the sails for the new breeze, we sail at nine knots for the next seven hours, with Faith pointing toward Vava'u.

Several hours after sunrise, land emerges, and I look forward to the lee of the island, where the seas lie down.

Once in the lee, we use the motor and headsail to calmly motor toward the village of Neiafu. There's something in the water, a change in the wave pattern or an eddying wind a quarter-mile away. Then they surface. I holler, "Whales! Come up here and look at this!" Three humpback whales, nearly the size of Faith, cross our bow and surface within a boat length, then wave their tails and disappear.


***

A look at any map or globe with lines of longitude will show the International Date Line with an odd characteristic: the line jogs to put Tonga's time zone first in the day rather than last, where the islands' physical location would have them otherwise. By sailing into Tonga, we've sailed into tomorrow.

We try more than once to tame Faith at the Customs dock in Neiafu. A swell is entering the bay, and the government dock is taking the brunt of it. We manage, though, and the officials board Faith for a look.

The Moorings charter boat company has operations in Tonga, and theirs are the best moorings for us. We radio for an assignment after clearing Customs and Immigration. As soon as we tie ourselves to the mooring ball, before getting comfortable, Chris kayaks over for a visit. He and his brother Nick sailed to Tonga with their parents, who are filming a documentary about the whales. They've been in Tonga for over a year. Another Chris and his sister Amanda, who also sailed here, come to visit. They've been here for several months with their parents.

There are many cruising kids in Neiafu. Among them are teenage boys, a new experience for Emily and Amanda and their mother and me since moving onto Faith.

***

We go to a charity beauty pageant one night. We don't go out of charity, that's just how it's billed. The Miss Cosmos Pageant. I wouldn't normally go to a beauty pageant, but this pageant is different, too otherworldly to turn down. It's a beauty pageant for fakaleiti.

Fakaleiti is part of Polynesian culture. The last child, especially in families of all boys, may be raised a girl. Sometimes fakaleiti are considered a third gender, often, but not always, homosexual. All I know is that The Miss Cosmos Pageant is first rate entertainment that we wouldn't find ourselves watching in the United States--you just don't take your family to something like this there. Here, it's good entertainment for Thomas and Helén and their children, and Lorrie and me and ours, and a number of families from Nieafu.

***

Intermittent showers occur every day during our first two weeks in Vava'u. It finally clears enough to cruise the Vava'u group of islands. We tour the islands for six days before returning to Nieafu.

The Neiafu Agriculture and Industry Show is hosting the king of Tonga. He hasn't visited Vava'u in several years. It isn't much different from a county fair at home, except there isn't a midway and a bunch of rides--just produce, livestock, marine products and several booths loaded with crafts and carvings, and the King. The locals are entertained when I ask a vendor about the urchins on display. "Just break it open and eat the eggs," is what I understand them to say. Judging by the amusement of those nearby, I misunderstand. It tastes like the swampy salty smell of low tide at a concrete pier when all the creatures are exposed. Maybe it's an acquired taste and I haven't eaten enough.

The king has a flashy motorcade led by a police car with the lights blinking, then a new SUV followed by a great big Ford van that he rides in. Nobody looks us over on our way into the fairgrounds, which is the soccer field of the high school. Nobody looks us over as we wander toward the tent where the king is sitting, or when we find seats in the grass less than a hundred feet away from him. Next to us is a policeman who does nothing except watch the King and the other speakers. I think about security at home, and how unnatural it is when the more security there is around, the more we fear what will happen without it, so we demand more security to protect us from our imagined fears in an emotional spiral.

Faith sits at The Moorings' mooring with her crew waiting for the right time to go swimming with the whales. Emily and Amanda spend a lot of time with Nicóle at Ana's Cafe, a little restaurant on the water. They make friends with the staff and spend afternoons there, cutting potatoes for French fries. They go for Karaoke nights and entertain themselves as best they can.

Thomas and Helén stop over to discuss plans for Fiji, and we agree to sail together to Savusavu on the island of Vanua Levu.

Before swimming with the whales, we check out of Tonga Customs and immigration, only to be told we must leave the kingdom immediately--most places allow up to twenty-four hours afterward. We anchor out of sight of the government offices and arrange for a whale-watch boat to pick us up here. Thomas and Helén can't go because, an hour before we embark on the watch, Thomas hears from Pacific Pearl, another boat from Sweden, that they're twenty miles out of Vava'u and have lost steering. Thomas and Helén offer to tow them into the anchorage and want to be available to help if they need it.

When we board the whale-watch boat, there's a man who's the pilot, a young Tongan woman who's the guide, and a young American woman with a video camera to document the experience on DVD in the event we want to purchase one at the end of the trip. Also onboard is a group of three Americans for their own whale-watching experience: a mother, her thirty-something son, and a friend of theirs. They're from San Diego.

Nicóle, Lucas, and Nadine go with us. The pilot takes us into open water where we see five adult whales lazing about, surfacing, then diving for several minutes, then surfacing again. While we're all ready to pee our pants with adrenaline, the guide runs through the safety precautions: if they breach, get out of the water, don't go any closer than the guide, and do not swim over the top of them. She then takes three of us at a time, in masks, snorkels, and fins, into the water to swim to a comfortable observation point.

Greggii, Lucas, and I go first. I hold Greggii as we swim to these twenty-meter animals lying motionless in the depths, shadows of greyer blue against an aqua background flickering with bolts of sunlight honed by the gentle roll above. Then slowly, almost imperceptibly at first, one whale builds effortless momentum to float to the surface and spout like Old Faithful to drink the air in a loud, hollow sucking noise, then peacefully descends after the violence of breathing, while another one or two follow the same ritual in a well-choreographed dance of life.

We rotate quickly through our first turns to make sure everybody gets to swim with them. Once everybody has had a chance, Lorrie, Greggii, and I swim out. Lorrie and Greggii tire and return to the boat to let Nicóle, Emily, and Amanda join me. We watch as one descends while a more distant whale rises; our vantage is such that they form a huge X as they pass each other.

Few events cause my world to freeze, but the underwater silence broken only by my breathing, while watching these magnificent shadows dance, is one such event.

Soon and suddenly, while the San Diego folks are in the water, one whale breaches. He comes out of the water at least half his length. That ends our swimming because the guides get nervous about one landing on a customer. Maybe that's why they make us prepay.

The young man from San Diego was the closest of anyone when that whale breached, and once he is back on the whale-watch boat, he sums up the feelings of all of us: "Ma! Did you see that? Did you see that, Ma? Wow! I've never seen anything like that in my life! Did you see that, Ma?" This is about all he is good for until our drop-off at Faith.

We leave Tonga with Smilla and sail within sight of each other for this five-hundred mile passage. Our departure witnesses another pod of whales, including calves, breaching. All we think about is the moments we shared their space.