With our unexpected invitation from SV Serengeti to a pot-luck party on Saturday evening (September 9th) we approached the party site at Nuku Island (anchorage # 8) the day before, hoping to find a good anchoring spot before it became too crowded. We tried to anchor in a big space between Serengeti and a catamaran but we could not get the anchor to hold. We were not willing to allow the anchor to catch, or the chain to rub, on coral so we chose to abandon the effort and motored 1 nm north to a cove we had visited in 2015, Port Maurelle.

Here we found sand and good holding between some moored boats and we all seemed to be nicely separated. As we returned from a snorkel, we found that a charter catamaran had tried to take the mooring with no float that was close to us. We had not seen the submerged ropes for the mooring until we snorkeled by them and they did not look very reliable. The catamaran crew had come to the same conclusion but rather than looking for another place to anchor, they anchored by the mooring which put them very close to Tregoning. This was a bit irritating but one member of the four couples renting the big boat came over to chat with us. So we agreed that it would be fine for a night but it was rather odd to be looking so closely into their cockpit area.



Tregoning getting cozy with chartered catamarans off each side of her stern

The snorkeling on the south side of the bay had, as I had remembered it from our previous visit, exceptionally clear water, very little living coral, but a good variety of fish species. These included ones that were new to me: Bleeker’s parrotfish, bicolor blenny, crown squirrelfish, spottail dartfish, and a parva goby.

On Saturday morning we took the dinghy back to Nuku Island where Katie and Jeff on SV Mezzaluna kindly told us where they had snorkeled on a pair of “seamounts” well to the east of the anchorage. Following their advice, we found good deep drop-offs on the outside where we had a fabulous view of a green turtle that became a bit curious about us. The visibility was not as good on the shallower side and there were only small patches of living coral. I was starting to see why Gail on SV Local Talent was becoming rather depressed about the state of the coral in Tonga, especially when she compared it to what she remembered from five years ago.

Sadly, she and Dean had missed snorkeling at Ha’afeva on their way through the Ha’apai Group so we strongly encouraged them stop there on their way back to New Zealand. We are yet to learn whether that will be possible, however, because they have spent almost four months in Tonga after which time you have to get a cruising permit from the Customs Office to avoid paying a substantial import tax on your boat. While getting such a permit for 12 months has seemed to be a routine paperwork and financial transaction in the past, we have been hearing on the VHF radio that no boats were being granted a permit of more than a week or two and, consequently, several were having to leave the country unexpectedly early because of this.



A boat anchored off the “party beach” at the north end of Nuku Island

While we were snorkeling, SV French Curve arrived at the edge of the Nuku Island anchorage. We greeted them from the dinghy as we returned towards Port Maurelle but had more time to chat at the evening’s pot-luck dinner on the island’s small beach. We had last seen Cheryl and Mark at San Felipe at the north end of the Sea of Cortez in Mexico in 2014. While we spent a second winter in Mexico, they pressed south along the Central American coast. We all left for French Polynesia in early 2015 but they were sailing from the Galapagos Islands and arrived after we had got there from Mexico.

While we scurried through French Polynesia in three months (keen to get to New Zealand for the southern summer), they stayed there for two years and only left a few months ago. While their tales of spending so much time in the Tuamotu and Society Islands sounded wonderful, we have no regrets about hurrying on to New Zealand. The only country that they visited that I feel was bit of a pity that we missed along the way, was Niue but we had chosen to go north to Penrhyn in the Cook Islands and American Samoa. If only it was easy to sail eastward to Niue from New Zealand…but it is not.



Cheryl and Mark from SV French Curve

The crews from about a dozen boats attended the pot-luck party and the selection of food was particularly tasty. There were several cakes for dessert including a cake that I had decorated with the words “Happy Birthdays”. This was because we were celebrating the September birthdays of five people (including mine and Cheryl’s), all of whom were women (presumably this was coincidental). Several people brought instruments so for a while Randall and Mark played their guitars while others sang and played ukuleles or percussion instrument. Eventually they were silenced by the smoke from a beach-fire that someone had unfortunately lit directly upwind of the musicians.



Dinghies lined-up at the party beach on Nuku Island

Luckily, the Digicel phone coverage in Vava’u is good so we could maintain access to the internet. Keeping tabs on the progress of Hurricane Irma across the northern Caribbean and Florida, we were especially concerned about UF friends Dan and Kathy who had evacuated from their waterfront house in the Florida Keys (and had a waterfront rental house in Crystal River), and cruising friends Kathy and Dan with their boat in Titusville on Florida’s east coast.

As if the hurricanes were not providing enough natural disasters to dominate the news, we heard of the devastating earthquake in Chiapas, Mexico. It caused tsunami warnings throughout the South Pacific but being early on Saturday morning, we did not know about them until the tsunami would have already reached Tonga. Fortunately for us, the warnings were for tidal surges of less than 0.3 m (12 inches) which, if they reached us at all within the reefs and islands of the Vava’u Group, were not noticeable. Strangely, after going to bed thinking about hurricanes, I had woken at 5:30 am and told Randall of my rather anxious dream about a tsunami before we got any news about the earthquake. So maybe I did detect some change in the water movement that had woken me up…or maybe I dream about tsunami and other water related issues on a regular enough basis for it not to be such an unlikely coincidence. Weird but, at least in this case, not particularly useful.