Attending a meeting on the East Coast of the US from Bora Bora guarantees being awake for sunrise and shifts my sleep schedule for the passage to Tonga. Worried about oversleeping I awoke at 8 bells. 8 bells can mean midnight or 4AM. Each bell marks a half an hour starting at midnight for four hours before it starts again. I got up to check the time and discovered it was midnight and I can go back to bed. Sleeping lightly, I sense the very faint roll from the wind generated waves in the lagoon. Unlike the Marquesas where the ocean tossed you to the side of the berth with each 3-4 second roll here you have to concentrate to feel the roll. Awake I notice when the morning travel to fish and to the resort jobs starts, at 515. Lunch in the US is sunrise here and I water the shafts of light illuminate the spires of Bora Bora. A conch shell horn sounds every 30 seconds from the beach where in the afternoon fishermen clean their fish and the children play in the sand. The horns are far from any tourist stop are this communities welcome to the morning.

We decided on smoked salmon and baguette breakfast at 6 AM]. Tonga is the only Polynesian island chain that was not colonized, is on the other side of the date line and a new tectonic plate. We are dreaming of anchoring in a volcanic crater. Errands done we drop the mooring lines for a peaceful 2-mile sail to the reef edge mooring field. Friday night is quiet here. Only one other boat in the mooring field. More rocking as boats transporting resort guests by give us wakes. One resort boat has a singing captain on a narrow boat with an outrigger who takes small groups on lagoon tours. Her plays the ukulele, sings and drives the boat together. I am glad our mooring is out of the channel where we are unlikely to get run over. The horizon to the ocean is clear except for the occasional breaking wave on the reef edge. Here we can hear the Polynesian Dancing drum beat from the resort's drifts across the lagoon in the still night. Tomorrow we will sleep late, linger over waffles, clean the hull a bit more and head west in the afternoon. From here the island mountain looms over us in the faint moonlight.