8/23/2015 Friday—Beverage Reef
This is a 280nm passage. We started off with good wind but it died off the next day leaving us to motor sail for a day and a half. This works out because we made water and more fully charged the batteries. Solar power is great for us but a little boast every once in a while is great, too.
On Tuesday, 8/17 we approached the reef at about :0930. This is just a reef. It’s all underwater. You can see it if you are close due to breaking waves. It is truly in the middle of no where. You can’t get there without a set of gps coordinates and you need another set to find the entrance through the reef to the lagoon. Fortunately, we had them or at least we hoped so. David had been there for a couple of days so he walked us in on the VHF.
Even with all this, there is a bit of anxiety. Water is breaking over the reef which is at all times underwater and you are relying on gps coordinates to hit an 80 foot pass through a mile wide reef which you can’t see beyond reading water movement when you are right on top of it. This is the reason Beverage is talked about a lot but probably visited by only 30 vessels a year. If you’re off, you hit the reef. This is a bad thing. Whales were all over fishing the shelf at one to two hundred feet off the reef.

But all was well and we hit the passage spot on; crossing in 25 feet of water. Inside the ocean swell is gone and you essentially enter a 1 mile by ½ mile placid lake in 35 feet of water. The bottom is sand with good holding. The clarity was amazing. Outside the pass, you could see down to over one hundred feet.
We met up with Aussie Rules, Day Break and Anahata taking a dingy out to the reef to snorkel around one of the wrecks in about 10-20 feet of water. Big fish, having grown to full maturity due to limited fishing I assume. We saw one puffer fish that was close to 3 feet long and large parrot fish along with the normal assortment of reef fish. All were just a bit larger than we had seen at other places—the perfect untouched sanctuary for them.
We had a bit of a weather surprise. A big system was moving out of New Zealand and coming our way with 35 kt winds and gusts to 50kts. So we all decided to run for Tonga to beat the weather and take refuge in the Vava’o group at the north end of Tonga.