Oct 3 5 am
It's kinda early because yesterday when I got home from dinner, I noticed that my new Furuno chart plotter (the one with the black screen in the dog house) had gone on the blink! I think it works but the screen is black. I can turn it on and off but it shows nothing. SO although I was almost falling asleep, this bothered me enough that I stayed up for an hour or so to try and fix it; but of course nothing that I did, worked. SO I wanted to get up early to shoot an email to Furuno support. I can get to NZ without it but it's a pain to have something brand new just fucking fail! It's the kind of stuff that really bums me out because I have enough not brand new things needing attention.

Today I'll try and find a good internet cafe and maybe we can skype. JC and Francoise should be coming in today so I'll look out for them.
Since I'm anchored on the far side of the inner bay I'm hard to spot.
Pelle and Ulle are fine and have been around here for 3 weeks. I guess there are nice anchorages around. We listened to a whale presentation at the restaurant/bar on the water. Fish tacos and a margarita (neither of them very good, but reasonable). The presentation was done by a dive shop operator/scientist who had started an NGO to watch/study whales in Tonga.

As I fill in the time in the subject line, I notice that there a day discrepancy (I was going to put Wednesday Oct 4th, but noticed that the computer said Tuesday Oct 3rd and indeed I got here yesterday on what I thought was Monday but it must have been Tuesday, Tonga time. SO although we're only at W173 longitude, Tonga must have put itself with NZ on the other side of the dateline. I didn't realize! How silly!