After the shock of having a 12 year old boy aboard, Tom and his endless stream of "why?" questions, we've had a very relaxed week here in Tonga slowly making our way through the many anchorages. The anchorages here are actually numbed (a good idea when no one can pronounce the names) and there's 42 of them! We only made it to around 9 but got to see the main areas. Our favourite ended up being number 8, it just had a really pretty island with a white sandy beach and a small town across the bay. Another memorable one was 16 were we found the best coral but to get to the reef we had to swim through breaking surf over just 1-2ft of coral, needless to say we got a few coral cuts. The snorkelling in most of Tonga has been disappointing (mainly because we were told it was so good), most of the coral is dead and colourless but number 16 at least had great coral formation though still lacked the vivid colours I remember as a child.

We've also spent a fair bit of time in Neiafu (the main town), after we dropped Kate and Tom off last week and this weekend. Neiafu is a little grubby and certainly third world though there is a little charm about the place. We've really enjoyed the pizza's at Aquarium cafe and watched some of the Olympics on their big screen, including the opening ceremony which we both thought was excellent.

In Neiafu the local yacht club runs the weekly Friendly Islands Friday night yacht race, we've raced twice now and both times were great fun. The first time there was but a breath of wind and we did very disappointingly. Whippersnapper does not have sails for such light conditions (gennakkers not allowed) and our cruising spec did us no favours. We held our own on the upwind passages but our genoa was too heavy to maintain any shape on the downwind legs and the smaller yachts and those with lighter genoas drifted ahead of us. The second week with better but still light winds we improved to finish in third place. The emphasis from the organisers was for a "fun, non-competitive race" but despite all the good intensions in the first week while on starboard tack we were put about twice but a yacht on port who should have given way and again this week a yacht on port just as we were crossing the finish line. It was a great experience to race away from those super-competative Sydney types but sailing in close quarters with those who don't know the rules can be just as alarming.

The really good news is also that Winter is over, well it only lasted about two weeks but after Niue and the first few days here in Tonga Mike and I were terrified the cooler weather was here to stay! Well it just turned out to be "cooler" for a few days and we're back to our preferred shirtless days and doona-less nights!

Today we're off to Fiji, it should be only a 2-3 days passage though it's a tricky one because we pass by many reefs and islands along the way, normally on passage it's just empty ocean so this time we'll need to be especially vigilant. We've even a list of coordinates for "uncharted reefs" though most of those we'll pass well north of. They say in Fiji there's two types of yachts, those that have hit a reef and those that are about too. Well before our family's have conniptions let us just say we've discussed this passage with a number of other experienced sailors here who've done it before and they all assure us those sayings were only popular in the days before GPS, chart plotters and radar!