Destinations – s/v Mysticeti

Back in the Western Hemisphere

We knew it was time to leave Fiji when members of the marina staff began to gather along the rim of the basin in front of our boat with guitars in hand. It was time for the goodbye song. Once they sang, we did not get off the boat again until we were all checked in to Samoa, two weeks later.

A few days earlier we had cruised over to Musket Cove. We made it to shore this time, which we had not last year. We joined the yacht club (about $10) so we would be able to show off our lifetime membership cards (can’t think of another reason), and had a couple nice meals and cold drinks on the deck of the cafe. It was there that Jan, our new crew member, announced that she had a medical concern that she wanted to see a doctor about before we went out to sea. Jan had been added to our crew list before we left home in March. It was the fact that she would be leaving Fiji with us that allowed her to travel in to Fiji on a one-way plane ticket. In the eyes of the government, we couldn’t leave the country without her leaving the country, too. But her Fijian doctor would not clear her for extended time at sea without further testing to resolve the medical issue. No one knew how long that might take, or what the end result might be. With that new wrinkle, it got complicated in a hurry. Immigration was already involved, and we wouldn’t be allowed to leave until there was a course of action. We had a few days of flexibility overall, but the windows to get home are relatively narrow considering the distance. We really could not afford to lose another year. Some hard decisions were made quickly, Jan flew home, presumably to see a doctor in the US, and we were allowed to leave only after the customs officer verified with the airport that she had actually boarded the plane. They have their rules. Clearing all this up became one more colossal distraction from prepping the boat and ourselves. Just what you don’t want when you’re in final countdown mode. And there had already been more than enough other distractions already.

Looking at a map, the shortest and easiest way to get to Samoa would appear to be by staying within the Fiji reef system and going between the main islands to Savusavu before checking out there. From there, we could approach Samoa from more of a southerly direction with more favorable winds. But, once checked out of Fiji, you are given a limited time to clear Fijian waters, and you are not supposed to touch land again. We did not think we could clear Fijian waters from Savusavu during daylight, and due to the number of rocks and reefs we’d be finding our way around, we didn’t want to get stuck after dark, either before or after we got to Savusavu. So we chose a more direct route out, leaving the reef the same way we came in, near Momi Bay. This reef pass is lighted and marked for night use. Unfortunately, it would require us to then turn north and go almost completely around and over the north side of Fiji to assume a route to Samoa.

As evidence of how flustered and on edge we’d become with the external distractions, as we approached the pass we noticed a patrol-type vessel approaching rapidly behind us. It appeared to have flashing or flickering lights on top. I watched it for a while, then my curiosity got to me and I grabbed the binoculars. Not only did it have flashing lights, but they were red and blue. It caught up to us as we were in the middle of the pass. Then they hit the siren. Now what? It was still behind us on the center line of the pass, but had already started to pull around to overtake us. It said POLICE on the side of the hull in big, block letters. Inside its cabin I could see several people standing in the window. All of them were waving with big arm movements. My heart skipped a few beats, and I certainly felt guilty of doing something majorly wrong, but they continued on by. They exited the pass ahead of us, then turned south. We turned north. Maybe it was just the overall friendly nature of everyone. Maybe the siren was just to alert us that they were overtaking. Maybe it was just my expectations after everything we’ve dealt with the last few months.

It wasn’t pretty and it wasn’t easy, but we did finally make it to Samoa. I say finally, because we tended to believe that it would be a relatively short shakedown cruise to check everything out while getting some easting in for a better angle on the trade winds before turning north to Hawaii. How hard could it be? A better question might be, How many things can go wrong in one passage? Going from Vuda Marina to Apia Marina ended up taking two full weeks, and It felt like it took a whole lot longer. Almost every day, some little worn out overtaxed piece of something broke or caused us problems. We had hoped we might get to Samoa in a week, but after about day ten, it really gets frustrating to realize, once again, that you won’t be spotting Samoa today, either. The problem was the wind direction was right on the nose, much higher than forecast (20 to 25, gusts over 30, rather than 12 to 15) and the seas were bigger than expected. We ran the engine a lot more than we’d planned. And even with that, found it hard to power directly into the wind and seas. We hove-to twice. Once, because we just couldn’t make headway worth the amount of fuel we were burning, and another time to wait for daylight before trying to enter Apia Harbor.

The procedure for Apia Harbor is supposed to be to call Harbor Control before entering. We tried multiple times, stating at more than an hour out, but nobody answered. We tried to call the marina, but again nobody answered. We came into the harbor anyway and anchored in the designated small craft anchorage, then called the marina on the cell phone. The cell phone was successful and we were told to come to the marina, but to keep trying to raise the harbormaster and ask them to alert Customs. We called them on the radio from apparently right outside their office. Not only did they answer this time, but they said they saw us, too. The marina helped us get tied up, but we’d have to wait until we were cleared before we could get off the boat. No problem.

It didn’t take long for the officials to show up, but then there was the almost-crew medical issue again. The Samoan health inspector was concerned about the unknown medical condition that caused her to be removed from our crew list, and suggested we might have to be quarantined in case it was contagious and we’d been exposed to it. But since it took us two weeks at sea to get from Fiji to Samoa, we had effectively already quarantined ourselves.

There aren’t many other boats here, but just like everywhere else we’ve been, the few people we’ve met have been outstanding in their friendliness and helpfulness. From our taxi driver, Tai, who even took us on a four hour tour of the island (no, I did not actually stay fully awake the entire time), to the folks on the boat already here when we arrived, Sao Nicolau, everyone has been going out of their way to offer help. She’s a physician, and he’s a German physicist who worked at Lawrence Livermore in California. They bought their boat in Portugal. If it wasn’t for the help of Wolfgang and the very long hose on his drill-powered transfer pump, and Tai making so many runs to the gas station with our combined load of jerry jugs in his trunk, we might still be working on refilling the diesel we burned trying to get here (there’s no fuel dock). I’d seen those little drill pumps before and always dismissed them as something I really didn’t need, but now that I know you can empty a jerry jug in about four minutes, from all the way across on the other side of the boat, without even lifting the jug off the dock or from where it’s stored on deck, it is the latest must-have on my shopping list.

Before we started this South Pacific trip in 2016, we did what we could to prepare for things that might happen. We put a lot of effort into anticipating troubles caused by being remote landlords, maintaining bank account access, paying bills, staying in communication with family, etc. No matter the preparation, and no matter how many levels of spares, backups and redundancies you try to build in, things never happen as expected. And some things you just can’t prepare for. Once again, soon after we arrived we learned of another death in the family. Kind of takes the wind out of the sails, so to speak. We’re on our way home, at least. Next planned stop is Oahu around the first week in July.

Fiji

Posted by John

We stayed in the Vuda Point Marina for a week. With no finger piers between boats for access, we learned to time climbing on and off with the tide. We climbed on and off from the bowsprit. There’s a hefty tidal range, so waiting for a mid-tide was the easiest, but not always convenient. For most of the week we waited for our cruising permit. Why ours took so long we don’t really know. It was supposed to come to the marina office by email, but the internet in Fiji has been messed up intermittently since we got here. We finally received one directly from the customs people when they came to check-in more boats on Monday. The permit is required to move the boat around within Fiji waters.

Once we were finally popped free from our spot in the marina, we took the boat around the corner to Saweni Bay. It doesn’t have the amenities of the marina, but it doesn’t cost anything, either. It also has a nice beach. We got together with several other boats we’ve met over the last two years: Me Too; Windrose; Terrapin; Mezzaluna; Enough and Spill the Wine. Plus a few others we hadn’t met yet, including one whose blog we’d been reading before we left home. We all took our dinghies to the beach, built a bonfire, and had a Fourth of July barbecue, organized by Clay from Me Too. We shot off sky rockets while singing The Star Spangled Banner. Robyn finds it somewhat ironic that, so far, her two most memorable Fourth of July events have been outside of the USA.

We wanted to visit Musket Cove, a resort on an island about fifteen miles away but within the Fiji reef system and, therefore, lacking any ocean swell. We heard that the whole place was jugged up with boats participating in the ARC Round the World Rally so we waited a few more days until they departed for their next destination. Although Windrose had reserved two spots in the little med-moor marina, we decided to anchor out rather than deal with another difficult-to-access-the-boat situation. Unfortunately, we had to anchor too far out, with too much fast boat traffic and choppy water to row all three of us all the way in. Our outboard needs a new carburetor, apparently because it sat unused on the deck in New Zealand for too long, and by the time we tried to clean out the carburetor, the screws were frozen in place. So we watched resort guests arrive and leave by seaplane, helicopter and ferry boat, and we rowed around the shallow reef towing a snorkeling Robyn behind. It was actually a very nice place to spend our last night on the boat.

After two nights anchored in Musket Cove, we returned to Vuda Marina, arriving ahead of the scheduled time of our haulout and placement in the cyclone pit. We tied to the buoy in the center of the circular marina and waited. When they appeared to be ready, we started the engine and got all set to release the mooring when they gave the signal. But then they towed a big, heavy, wood-hulled ketch over to the lift, and took it out instead. It broke the travel lift. We weren’t going anywhere for a while. They let us stay tied to the buoy.

We moved off the boat anyway, hitching a ride to shore with a marina employee and spending the night in one of the marina’s little guest cottages as we had planned. It’s kind of our halfway house, I guess, as we ease back into a life on shore.

That was Tuesday. It took until Thursday until they were ready to haul us out. We were taken back out to the boat—still in the center of the marina—around 7:30 in the morning. We backed into the travel lift. A diver dove beneath the boat to place the slings in the proper position, then tied them together underwater, as well as above the water, and after lifting us a few feet out of the water, they placed even more horizontal strapping to keep the sling from slipping up the sloping keel. Compare this to the yard in Opua, where we were asked to put little stickers on the hull to show where we wanted the slings placed.

We still have a lot to do here in the next couple of weeks to secure everything before finally leaving for home, but the boat is now stuck in a hole in the ground, and we are no longer living on it. Although, I’m pretty sure something will try to move in and make a home while we’re gone. This is the tropics, after all.

There’s a lot to be said for flat water, sometimes. From the left, Mezzaluna, Terrapin and Bear, in Saweni Bay.

Fourth of July, 2018 Saweni Beach, Fiji (Terrapin photo)

Our new (used) chartplotter, installed as a New Zealand project, guiding us back to Vuda from Musket Cove

We were disappointed to find thousands of barnacles after just putting on more than $1,000 worth of bottom paint in February. The couple hours of scraping labor, and the pressure washer blasting off so much expensive paint, was not easy to take.

Our little cottage, with hot and cold running water (usually) and air conditioning

Christmas?

Posted by John

I learned a long time ago that if the years seem to be passing too quickly, it’s time to try something different. A year ago we spent Christmas in La Paz, Mexico after sailing down the entire coast of the continental United States and Baja California. That was different enough from a normal Christmas then, but now even that seems so long ago and far away.

With Julie’s brother and nephew being joined here by his wife and other son, we ended up with a completely different experience than even what we were already having. The extra help, knowledge and moral support, meant we could tackle a few things I might’ve been reluctant to try myself. As a result, our non-functioning oven is now functioning again. The starter motor, which has been acting up at times, including on the crossing from Tonga, was removed, disassembled, inspected, contacts cleaned and, hopefully, will be more reliable now. We have a new alternator, and will carry the old one as a spare. We have new binoculars to replace the ones that fell apart in Bora Bora, a new goose neck pin for the main boom, and a lot of input and feedback on several other projects. Combined with a new tablet computer to fill in for the laptop that failed in the Marquesas, and our own car, it was almost like Christmas. I say “almost like” because we find it hard to feel like Christmas when it’s summer and the sun is still up well into the evening. Holiday decorations just don’t look right in the sunshine. Maybe that’s why we seem to have seen so few.

This is prime vacation time for New Zealanders. Everything is crowded, including the marina and the marina parking lot. Normally we wouldn’t care about a parking lot except that now we find ourselves worrying about finding a place to park our car. We lost a hubcap already, and likely need a brake job. Gas is terribly expensive, and our credit cards don’t work at unattended gas stations. Mobility is nice, but owning a car can be a hassle.

Having family here meant we actually went out and acted like tourists. We explored the far north end of New Zealand, took a miles-long bus ride on a beach, saw huge sand dunes, took a ferry ride to the historic town of Russell, visited a limestone cave with a ceiling covered by bio-luminescent glow-worms, and even went to the top of the Sky Tower in Auckland.

We stopped at this scenic inlet off Rangaunu Bay near Pukenui

Another view of the same inlet near Pukenui. Little dark dots in the grass on the other side are a herd of cows. There are millions of cows and sheep in New Zealand.

Special tour bus drives right down Kauaeparaoa Stream between huge sand dunes

It wouldn’t be New Zealand if you couldn’t stop for a quick slide down the dune

Ninety-Mile Beach on the Tasman Sea side of the North Island

Tour bus can adjust the air pressure in the tires for driving on sand. It wasn’t ninety miles, but it was a long trip along the beach.

Along the waterfront in Russell on the day before Christmas

Landscape at the limestone “Glow-Worm” cave

Mobility

Posted by John

As nice as the Opua marina is, we do need to get around. A van offers trips a few days a week to Paihia for grocery runs at the supermarket, and cars can be rented easily with a phone call. We took advantage of both the van and the rental cars more than once. We drove to Whangarei to check out a boatyard and see if there was a better place to keep the boat near there. On another trip we drove all the way to Auckland to pick up Julie’s brother and nephew at the airport. On both trips we spent the night at backpacker hostels. On the return trip from Auckland we stopped at Avis to pick up a rental car for Julie’s brother, and the battery in our rent-a-dent died. Fortunately, Avis had a jump starter.

For real mobility, and to save us from going broke on rental car charges, we decided we needed our own car. So we bought one.

Shopping for and buying a car in a foreign country—with left-side driving, no less—was never on my bucket list (or any to-do list), but it became something of a priority once we got here, considering our ambitious plans for the next few months. Of course, once it rose to the top priority, used cars for sale seemed to mysteriously become scarce. We searched internet postings, used car lots, message boards and car auction sites all the way to Auckland. The cars we were willing to gamble on always seemed to get sold just before we could get to them. Finally, we just happened to see an ad for this car posted on the laundry room board. We jumped on it.

After we called the seller, he offered to drive it over to the marina so we could have a look. As soon as we met him, people seemed to come out of nowhere to ask if the car was for sale. They opened doors, walked around looking at the tires, asking questions. Only after we said (loudly) that we’d take it and started filling out a transfer of ownership form, did they concede and go back to whatever they had been doing before.

The next morning we went to two ATMs in Paihia with three different bankcards in order to withdraw enough cash, then we met the seller again and completed the deal. The post office handled the registration transfer. For licensing and insurance purposes, the marina address is now our “permament residence” in New Zealand. The woman at the post office knew exactly what address we wanted to use, as she had done “a few” before.

It ended up being an easy process. Next up is a trip to town to see Star Wars.

A pleasant landscape on the way to Auckland

It’s been a while since we’ve had to navigate around a big city

Nuku’Alofa – Last Stop in Tonga

Posted by John

We’ve done this before. We get complacent about the next crossing because it’s such a short distance compared to others we’ve done that we think it’s going to be a piece of cake. We liked Neiafu. We were comfortable there and stayed longer than we had planned. There was always one more thing; one more nice breakfast, or pizza, or laundry load, or store trip. Just one more day. After all, we could get to our last stop at Tongatapu in just a couple of days. We had plenty of time still.

We wanted to go to the south end of the country, to the island of Tongatapu and the community of Nuku’alofa. There is a place there, on the tiny island of Pangaimotu called Big Mama’s. Many boats on their way to New Zealand go there to do final preparations and hang out while waiting for a weather window.

We only get thirty days in Tonga. Having checked in at Neiafu, we planned to check out at Nuku’alofa. This is a common practice. We plotted a course on the chart. It measured out to something like 176 miles. No big deal. We can do that in a couple of days. I even briefly wondered if we could tow the dinghy rather than put it up on deck. That way, if we passed an anchorage that we just couldn’t resist stopping at, we’d be ready to go land on the beach. It felt like we were just going to travel through the islands of Tonga, and not really go out into any big ocean. We were wrong, of course.

Cruising through the islands of the Vava’u group

The day we left Neiafu a 2,000 passenger cruise ship arrived. They warned everyone on the morning radio net that it had arrived and that there would be a lot more people on the streets and in the shops. That was the confirmation we needed that we had picked the right day to finally leave.

A cruise ship arrived the day we left Neiafu and began shuttling passengers to shore

Cruising through Vava’u Group was nice, but it only lasted a few hours before the islands ended and the open ocean, along with the wind and waves that go with it, began. We quickly abandoned any thought of motoring along a direct line to Tongatapu and put up first one sail, then another. The sails helped to dampen the rolling. The wind was almost right on the nose, which meant we had to either sail off at an angle away from where we wanted to go, or continue motoring into it, which was very uncomfortable. We were plowing into every wave. Even under power, the headwind and waves slowed us to about two knots, and sometimes less.

We shut off the engine and sailed. Our newly barnacle-free hull allowed for normal sailing speed. In fact, it was very pleasant sailing (for the most part). The only problem was we were sailing southwest toward southern Fiji, not south toward southern Tonga. This would’ve been great if we were already on our way to New Zealand. I kind of wished we were. It’s amazing how fast an asset (Tongatapu) can turn into a liability, but we had to stick with our original plan in order to check out of Tonga and get clearance for New Zealand.

When we turned and tacked back, about the best we could do was sail east, sometimes even a little northeast. At least it got us away from an area of the chart marked with notices of “Volcanic Activity Reported” as recently as 2017 (Yikes!) (and, Wow, we have a current chart!). By continuing this process for four days, we made slow but steady progress. I don’t know how far we actually sailed, but it was hundreds of miles farther than the 176 we had marked on the chart. We had to sail past islands in the dark that we couldn’t see. One night, a block that guides the jib sheet into the winch exploded with a bang. At first we thought we hit something because the whole boat shook, but then we found shrapnel (pieces of the block). We replaced it with a spare. Finally, we started up the engine again, took down the sails, and powered our way through the final night and half of the fifth day, directly into Nuku’alofa and the “Big Mama Yacht Club.”

It turned out that Big Mama’s is the kind of place that is exactly what I imagine whenever I think of the tropics. It’s the kind of place that appears as if it could’ve been built out of driftwood by survivors of the shipwreck just off the beach in front. It’s the kind of place that compels people to write their names on the wall just to say they were there.

There is a daily ferry to the other side of the harbor, which we took to go to the bank, the bakery, the customs office, the grocery, to fill our diesel jugs, and to buy more minutes for our Digicel phone. And of course, to eat lunch and ice cream cones.

I don’t know if it was just our lack of expectation, or kind of the way we planned it, but we definitely seem to have saved the best for last. It’s almost as if Tonga was telling us, “Wait, don’t go, there’s more.” But if everything goes as planned, we’ll leave Tonga (because we have to) before the last day of October and head off to Opua, New Zealand. It won’t be tropical, but it will be summer there. We’re looking forward to spending some time traveling around on land, and we have several projects planned to get the boat in shape for the return trip home next year.

One thing for certain, we aren’t taking the next crossing lightly.

Scraping Barnacles

Posted by John

Normally, cleaning the hull would be just a regular maintenance item, but when you decide to do it yourself using scuba gear, and you haven’t dived in over twenty years, it might be worth a blog post of its own.

On our passage to Tonga we suspected that the hull needed cleaning. We had cleaned the waterline more than once in French Polynesia, and it already needed it again. But we hadn’t had the entire bottom cleaned since the two times we had it done in Mexico.

Most of the waterline cleanings have been done by Julie. Her technique involves straddling a pool noodle in the water, hanging onto a suction cup hull gripper, and working her way around the boat with a plastic scraper, scrubby pad and boot brush. My technique involves lying in the dinghy alongside the boat and reaching over the side to scrub the waterline. After a few feet of waterline scrubbing I tend to get lazy and may even doze off. My technique doesn’t work as well as Julie’s, but being in the water on the surface with my feet dangling down gives me the willies for some reason. Twenty-five years ago I was an avid scuba diver diving with sharks, barracuda and all manner of sea creatures big and small. Even though I never had fish nibbling my toes (I was “mouthed” by both a stingray and a cabezon) I still seem to have developed a fear of it, so I prefer my technique of waterline scrubbing, or at least making an attempt at it. It was while lying in the dinghy next to the boat that I reached under as far as I could and felt a solid surface of tiny barnacles on the bottom of our hull.

With visions of needing a hammer and chisel to chip thousands of barnacles off the hull keeping me awake at night, we started asking around. In the Mexican marinas, divers with hookah systems powered by electric air compressors from Home Depot came around looking for jobs all the time. Not so in Tonga. The recommended procedure here is to go around the corner to the boatyard in the next bay for a haul out and pressure wash. This required an appointment a week out and costs more than we wanted to spend, not to mention the hassle of the haul out itself and the toll that the pressure washing would take on what’s left of our bottom paint. We’re going to repaint in New Zealand so we don’t want to haul out before then if we don’t have to. We decided to scrape the barnacles ourselves.

We brought one complete set of scuba gear with us. All of it was sitting around in our garage at home and had not been used on a dive since 1996. We brought it along for that dire emergency when it would be necessary to untangle the prop or clear the engine water intake.

We found a dive operator in Neiafu willing to rent us two tanks, a buoyancy compensator vest, a regulator and gauges, and a weight belt for 50 pa’anga (about $25). We took our dinghy over to his shop along the waterfront and loaded it up before he went out for the day. He wanted it all back between 4:00 and 4:30 the same day. We had our own masks, fins and dive skins. Due to the damage barnacles can do to skin, I wanted to wear the 3mm wetsuit that I had also brought along. Of course, the last time I had worn it was when Julie and I went diving in Hawaii in 1996. With the rented gear we were all set, two of us could dive at the same time. Since Robyn had a painful thing going on in her ear canal and wasn’t going into the water, it would be Julie and me. What could possibly go wrong?

My wetsuit is a one-piece with a zipper up the back. I struggled to get my legs into it, finally succeeded, and then realized that my legs were in where the arms are supposed to go. Regardless, the suit was backwards anyway. Getting my legs out again was even harder than getting them in. By the time I got the suit on properly I was already exhausted. Getting old sucks.

The thought of diving from our own boat was kind of exciting, but I’ve never dived off a sailboat before, and our boat is certainly not the best design for getting into dive gear and then getting into the water. We decided we’d have to get geared up in the dinghy and get into the water from there. The dinghy is small. Dive gear is heavy and awkward. Just putting everything together was an exercise in thinking way back to a couple of decades ago. “Hey Robyn, do the hoses come out the top or the bottom?”

We finally got everything set up and ready. All we had to do was help each other get the tanks and weights on. I needed the weight belt to counteract the buoyancy of the wetsuit, and Julie put the few weights we brought from home into her BC pockets (her BC was designed for that). The problem was, since we had put our fins on already our feet were too big to move around in the dinghy. We were standing on each other, unable to move. I took my fins off again. Julie helped me get my tank and the weight belt on. She then hung her legs over the side of the dinghy and I helped her get her tank on. Then I sat on the edge and put my fins back on. Her feet were dangling outside, and my feet rested firmly inside on the dinghy floor. Then, with mask in place and breathing through the regulator, I gathered up all the hoses and gauges and held them against the weight belt buckle to keep it from popping open, put my other hand on my mask and regulator mouthpiece, and did a backwards roll into the water for the first time in more than twenty years. Just like riding a bike. It all came back instantly. Except that it wasn’t my gear and it didn’t fit properly, it was uncomfortable, and I was breathing way too fast.

We went up to the bow and I pulled myself down the anchor chain to the bottom. Hello fish, I’ve missed you. But I didn’t have enough weight. If I let go of the chain I floated right back up. Julie couldn’t stay down either. It’s really hard to accomplish anything underwater when you are too buoyant and it takes all your energy just fighting to stay down.

Rather than both of us working together at the same time, we decided to take Julie’s weights out of her pockets and put them on my belt. We could then trade off with the belt and take turns scraping. Of course, we took the extra weights and strung them onto the belt while we were in the water. My BC was a front-inflate, designed to roll you over face up, while Julie’s BC is a rear-inflate with weight pouches in the front. With neither of us having any weight at all except for the weight belt we were both struggling with and trying not to drop, we bobbed and floated all over the place. If we had dropped any weights, especially the entire weight belt, we’d have a rough time of getting down to the bottom to retrieve it.

Once we got the weights worked out, we scraped for what seemed like most of the day. Going over the entire underside of a 42-foot, full keel hull with a 5-inch scraper takes a long time. Some of the barnacles were holding on too tightly to just scrape off. They will have to wait for the haul out. The water clouded up with everything we were getting loose, including tiny crabs and krill. The bottom of our boat had become a little ecosystem. When working overhead, everything floated down into our faces. I kept bumping my head on all the barnacles that weren’t scraped yet (they hurt). Those guys in Mexico really earned the few pesos they were asking for.

When we were done, we inflated our BC’s and took them off so the tanks would float on the surface. I managed to get my fins off and into the dinghy without dropping them, then while Julie kept the tanks from floating away, I went up the boarding ladder and stepped into the dinghy. From there I could drag the tanks out of the water. We left everything in the dinghy and went up onto the boat to drink beer. When I took off the wetsuit it was a surprise to see how many little wiggling creatures had gotten inside of it. In a very short time it was 4 PM and we remembered we had to run everything back to the dive operator.

Completely exhausted, we slept well that night. And it felt good to have “gotten back into diving,” such as it was. Maybe now that we’ve broken the ice, and Robyn is recently certified, we can do some actual diving for fun before we get back home.

Those black branch-like things are barnacles trying to grab passing nutrients

I’m getting pretty tired at this point; the weight belt has slipped down and is not at all comfortable, and the bulge on my right ankle is because 26-year old Velcro isn’t holding anymore.

The heavy growth area at the bottom is the top of the rudder; the whole rudder looked like that when we started, and the little fish were hanging out in it

Anchored out in Neiafu Harbor

Posted by John

We come to these places expecting not to stay very long, but then we do. We find what we need on shore, learn our way around, develop a routine and get comfortable. You can’t be on constant vacation, it takes too much work. You have to just live normal sometimes, too. The problem is there’s a lot in Tonga we’d like to see and do as a vacationing tourist on our way south through the country, but we have to leave for New Zealand by October 28th, the day our Tonga visas expire. And, we just discovered that the boat bottom is covered with little barnacles (probably getting bigger every day) that likely caused our slow speed from Pago Pago. Not only do New Zealand’s strict bio-security requirements call for a clean hull, but we need all the speed we can get in order to dodge the weather fronts that pass at regular intervals between Minerva Reef and New Zealand. Scraping barnacles: one more thing on the to-do list. I miss all those helpers in Mexico who came around looking for work.

In many ways Tonga is my favorite so far. That was unexpected. Maybe that’s why it’s left such a good impression. It certainly is different from American Samoa. Rather than high, steep-sided volcanic ridges affording a narrow view of the sky from inside the harbors, these islands look more like those we have at home; long, low, tree covered hills that offer some breathing room.

The bay at Neiafu is so well protected that at times it can be flat calm with a view of the bottom. During one dinghy ride back out to the boat after sunset, the calm water, still air, purple and orange sky, and the summer-like scent of the water took me back to those perfect summer evenings of childhood. There are giant clams here, and coral. Reserves have been established to protect both. In contrast to industrialized Pago Pago, this place is dead quiet at night, and by law, Sunday is a day of rest and quiet. Who can argue with the law? One morning I heard distant, barely audible choir singing at 5 AM. And it’s always nice to wake up to the bird sounds.

Like all of the other islands we’ve been to, chickens and stray dogs free range everywhere, although there seem to be far fewer feral dogs here than, well, anywhere else since leaving the U.S. Since the first morning when we saw a herd of cows on the beach, we’ve also seen roaming pigs along the road and on a beach.

It is almost like we crossed a line somewhere between American Samoa and Tonga. Maybe we’ve finally gone over the edge of the earth and now we’re down under. The Kiwis and Aussies are here and they’ve opened a whole array of restaurants, cafes and bars offering what they know cruisers are looking for, including assistance and advice. No need for a McDonald’s to substitute as a cruiser lounge, Neiafu has Tropicana, Bellavista, Mango and Aquarium, to name a few. Just like cruiser hangouts in Mexico, there is also a morning VHF radio net where you can ask just about any question and be directed to whoever likely has the answer. Getting to shore couldn’t be much easier. There are dinghy docks at nearly all of the shoreside businesses.

However, down here some things are different. If you want coffee with breakfast it will likely be a shot of espresso unless you order a long black. I’m not sure what a flat white is, but I think it might be a long black with cream. There are sports on TV, but they’re not likely to be the NFL. The first time I saw a poster stating “We (heart) All Blacks” I thought it was a little strange, until I learned that All Blacks is the name of the New Zealand national rugby team.

Our dinghy at the Mango Cafe dinghy dock

Julie (in dinghy) talking with My Dream’s New Zealand crew member (head in water)

Don’t judge a business from the outside, Bounty Bar has an evening dress code. The boy on the post was climbing up and jumping off into the water.

While the boys were swimming at the concrete steps, the girls were swimming at the plastic dock. It’s probably not a good idea to leave the dinghy at either dock when kids are out of school.

Neiafu, Tonga – Checking in to Vava’u

Posted by John

Same time, different day. The dateline has been drawn in such a way that Tonga, although still east of 180 degrees longitude, is on the west side of the dateline. The official time in American Samoa is GMT -11 hours, while the official time in Tonga is GMT +13 hours. So if it’s noon in Greenwich, England, it’s 1 AM in American Samoa, and also 1 AM in Tonga, but a day later. No need to reset the clock, just the calendar.

We had planned for a three-day crossing from Pago Pago to Neiafu in the Vava’u island group, but it took us four days because we just couldn’t get up to our target speed of six knots. Seeing everything that took up residence on our anchor chain after five weeks in Pago Pago harbor, there’s no telling what kinds of marine organisms attached themselves to our hull that could be causing added drag.

Once we got to Neiafu we lost yet another day getting through customs. We arrived in the harbor late in the day and just wanted to get secured, either on a mooring or anchored, before it got dark. On the way in we cruised past the wharf where we were supposed to go for checking in. It was after hours, but we got a good look at it. It wasn’t pretty.

The water in the bay was so flat and calm and eerily quiet that I got the best night’s sleep in a long time. I had to think hard in the morning to remember where we were. With the sound of cows “mooing,” I looked out and saw a herd on the beach. That was a new one.

As we were getting ready to start the engine and raise the anchor to go across the bay to tie up at the wharf, we watched a string of five boats, all flying yellow “Q” flags (indicating that, like us, they were not yet checked in), take all available spots along the wharf. They stayed for hours as we waited and watched from the other side of the bay with binoculars. By 2 PM we just said “screw it” for the day, drank some beer, and decided to get up early and be the first ones there in the morning. The five boats eventually all left, but by then it was too late in the day.

While we enjoyed the evening, we watched both a high speed passenger ferry and a car ferry/cargo ship come in and take up all of the dock space. The freighter wharf was still open, but from what we had seen from cruising by the day before, we really didn’t want to go in there if we could help it.

The next morning we stuck to our plan and headed over to the wharf as soon as we had enough light to see where we were going. Both ships were still there. We could see a crowd on shore and lots of activity. The passenger ferry appeared to be loading. The car ferry also appeared to be loading, with forklifts moving large crates up the loading ramp and a long line of cars waiting. We took another close look at the freighter wharf but it looked dangerous and too high to be useful. We didn’t want to risk trying it. It seemed that with our luck, if we did manage to successfully tie to it, a freighter would probably come in and we’d just have to leave anyway. Unlike Pago Pago, there was no one to communicate with to give us direction.

We hung out just offshore of the passenger ferry until it departed, then moved into its space along the wharf and positioned ourselves up against a large tire hanging along the wall. The people on shore were still waving to their departing friends on the ferry when we moved into the space right in front of them. Once tied, the wind was holding us off the concrete, which was a good thing.

I took our bag of documents and went off into the crowd of activity to look for the customs office and announce our arrival. After a cursory look at our passports, I was handed a stack of forms to fill out and told to go back and wait on our boat.

Over the next couple of hours we were visited, separately, by three officials from Quarantine, Health and Customs. The quarantine guy, once convinced we had no pets, meat or rotting fruit on board, took all of our on-board garbage for special disposal. The health guy drove up in a car and was dressed in business clothes, including leather shoes with socks. It was a very odd sight seeing him climbing down onto our boat. It made me feel a little sad to think about probably having to put on real shoes when we get to New Zealand. None of us have worn shoes since last December in La Paz.

The customs guy (who was barefoot) told us that some rules were changing, but since the King of Tonga had abolished the Parliament until new elections were to be held, the changes weren’t being enforced yet. He said it was confusing to everyone, and he felt sorry for the “yachties.” I said it was confusing at home in the U.S. right now, too. All he had to say about that was, “Trump.”

So, on our third night in Tonga we finally anchored as legal visitors. But it wasn’t as quiet as the first night, and by morning we had some unexpected excitement. A severe squall system with lightning, thunder, prolonged torrential rain and multi-directional winds of nearly 40 knots came through the Neiafu anchorages like a wrecking ball. The VHF radio net came alive with concerned chatter. Many shore-side businesses participate in the net, including one with good access to local weather data. He came on with satellite pictures a few minutes old, and assured everyone it should not last much longer.

Our plans for an already delayed cafe breakfast on shore were put off for yet another day.

Waiting for the passenger ferry (white boat on left) to leave

As soon as the ferry moves out, we’re docking in its place

Everyone’s morning plans were ruined with the crazy squall system

The main street in Neiafu, Tonga; a left-side drive country

These islands look very much like a tropical San Juans, or Canadian Gulf Islands

Hard to believe this is the same day as the morning storm

Nice to finally find a place that knows there’s more to beer than just lager

American Samoa

Posted by John

American Samoa is a territory of the United States. With that comes certain familiar things, such as the US dollar. The main benefit of this is you don’t have to dig out reading glasses and study each coin to figure out its value when trying to hand over the correct change. You can also get NOAA Weather Radio broadcasts any time you want just by pressing a button on the radio, but you’ll probably have to wait through the Samoan language version. And there is none of that special feeling you get when all of the traffic screeches to a halt just for you when you walk up to a crosswalk, like in Papeete, on Tahiti. Here, the traffic is more likely to pretend they didn’t see you standing half-way out in the street. Beyond that, the lifestyle here appears more in line with other Pacific islands rather than the United States in general, or Hawaii. The family homes with the elaborate burial plots in the front yards are still a bit startling, even though commonplace. It’s nice for us to have this mid-trip re-connection with the USA, no matter how slight, after having been away for so long. But it can be confusing.

For example, I was walking around trying to find the rumored laundromat in the area. The street was narrow and uneven and the small buildings seemed randomly placed. Chickens and skinny dogs wandered across the street. Someone in a group of people sitting on the side of the road asked if I was looking for something. I kind of fumbled over the word “laundry.” I had just spent ten months in Spanish and French speaking places and wasn’t sure what one was called here. A woman in the group looked at me weird, then asked in perfect English, “You mean, like, a laundromat?”

Laundromat. Yeah, that’s it. She then directed me to its location about a block away.

I’ve never been a huge fan of McDonald’s, but I do like their breakfasts. The Pago Pago Harbor dinghy dock is, basically, the McDonald’s dock (since it’s right there), and the large, air-conditioned seating area with Wi-Fi and television is the de facto Cruiser’s Lounge. We spent several mornings in there doing email, catching up on news, talking with other cruisers and making plans. More than once breakfast carried over into lunch, sometimes even with a snack in between. McDonald’s does make it easy.

American TV is broadcast here. We were able to watch a nationally televised preseason Seahawks game being played in Seattle which, if nothing else, made me think about how much ocean is between us and getting back home again next year. With our two-year trip half over, I’m allowing myself the occasional thought about the day we sail back into the Straits of Juan de Fuca. I don’t know what that day will be like except that it will be a noteworthy day.

American Samoa is kind of an odd place. There are no real services for visiting yachts; no recreational boating industry that we’ve seen. Need a replacement navigation light? Try Amazon. And judging from the number of Amazon packages that get picked up at the Post Office, they do a good business here.

The harbor is dominated by a huge Starkist tuna operation on one side, and a container ship dock on the other. The electrical power plant for the entire island is also on shore, running day and night with never-ending, industrial-quality noise. What few cruising boats are here are relegated to a designated anchorage area.

There is not much tourism here, no resorts or big hotels. All through French Polynesia locals, usually men, would come out in the early mornings and evenings to paddle around in their canoes, and you’d see families in boats all the time. Not here. Perhaps one reason there isn’t much recreational boating is because there is nowhere to go. Leave the bay and you’re in the big seas. This is, after all, just a big rock in the middle of the ocean. The weather has even hindered our ability to get to shore. It kept us on the boat for a week straight. Twenty-five knots sustained, gusts to well over thirty, and whitecaps in the bay are a bit much for our little dinghy and 2hp outboard motor. We wouldn’t get much wetter if we swam to shore.

It was during thirty-knot gusts and heavy rain that cruisers in the bay came together on very short notice to save us and rescue another boat in the process (or maybe the other way around), when a sailboat that had anchored just upwind of us dragged anchor over the top of our anchor and came perilously close to our bowsprit. If we had hit, both boats would certainly have been damaged. Andiamo was unoccupied at the time and had a reportedly crappy anchor. We could not raise ours and move out of the way without hitting him since he was on top of our anchor. Just in time, dinghies from Slow Flight, Me Too, Terrapin and the British boat, Pickles converged and tied onto both sides of Andiamo. With people climbing on board to steer and handle the anchor, they used their outboards to move Andiamo away from us while we brought up our anchor so we could move and re-anchor ourselves. The subsequent attempts to re-anchor Andiamo were unsuccessful, and the boat was moved to the end of the bay and tied to an unused mooring.

When Andiamo’s owner eventually returned, he was mystified (let’s say concerned) as to how and why his boat had been moved, and by whom. When told what had happened, he was most appreciative for the team effort to save his boat. We are too.

Our three biggest reasons for coming to American Samoa were the United States Post Office, Priority Mail and “If it fits it ships” boxes. We had not had mail forwarded to us since Mexico, and that was a hassle coming by DHL through Mexico City. So we had mail, including credit cards, bank and insurance documents, parts that we hoped would fix the autopilot, canvas fasteners, renewed boat documentation and other things all being sent or forwarded to us at General Delivery, Pago Pago, American Samoa 96799. Most of the packages were being tracked, arriving on a flight from Honolulu. They should have all come together, about the same time we arrived, but [as of this writing] it has taken five trips [and still counting] to the post office to retrieve [most of] them, [more than] three weeks later than we expected. One post office employee told me “Do not use priority mail, use EXPRESS priority mail. (Unfortunately, the parts did not fix the autopilot.)

Many things here have been disappointing. We tried to get a phone SIM card, but the system here is not compatible with our phone. We bought Wi-Fi access from Bluezone. We can barely get a signal out on the boat from the nearest Bluezone hot spot, but at least it’s something. McDonald’s Wi-Fi is pretty good when we’re there, but neither Bluezone nor McDonald’s is fast enough or stable enough to load photographs to the web site without it timing out. Robyn went to the public library and said that for $5 they have really fast internet. If this post includes pictures below, it means that the library internet came through for us. The weather has also gotten to us a bit. It’s hot, even when it rains all the time. And the wind gets pretty crazy out in the bay. That keeps us on an uncomfortable boat, not doing much except checking our anchor and watching the boats upwind from us.

We took a bus ride to the Cost U Less for provisioning for the next two months. The buses here are made from pickup trucks of various sizes. The passenger area is made of wood, with plywood floor and seats. They all seem to have very loud music systems. The buses are all privately owned and painted as such, sometimes elaborately, but they follow established routes on no set schedule. The Cost U Less itself resembles Costco. It even has several Kirkland brand products. There was no way to get everything we bought back on a bus, so we took a taxi back to the dinghy dock. On an English-speaking island, we apparently got the only non-English speaking driver. He made more than one stop for reasons we never understood. At one point he handed his phone to Julie so she could explain to his dispatcher where we wanted to go. And on one of his stops he bought us some coconuts, maybe to make up for all the confusion? One thing though, the road between Pago Pago Harbor and the Cost U Less is very scenic where it runs along the shore.

Although even some of the locals we’ve talked to say that the other Samoa is nicer, we’ll probably skip it if we get a good weather window and go straight to Tonga. Somewhere in southern Tonga will be our last stop before crossing to New Zealand in November. We plan to spend the South Pacific cyclone season doing boat work and exploring New Zealand before turning around and heading for home in 2018.

Pago Pago Harbor with All Day at anchor and Starkist plant in background

Spontaneous team effort to re-secure Andiamo in the wind and rain after it almost dragged into us

Buses built from pickup trucks, one we rode even had a flat screen for passengers

Best dinghy dock we’ve seen since Mexico

Bora Bora

Posted by John

I don’t know when I first heard of Bora Bora, but I do remember seeing someone with a Bora Bora T-shirt at Greenlake Park in Seattle during the summer of 1983. I wanted a Bora Bora T-shirt too. I don’t think I knew exactly where Bora Bora was then, except that it was an exotic place far away in the Pacific. And okay, I know for sure that it was summer, but I admit it could’ve been ’82 or ’84. Memory is a funny thing.

Now, all these years later, my thoughts were not so much about Bora Bora’s exotic nature as that it was generally the end of the line for French Polynesian cruising. All of the Puddle Jump and Oyster Yacht World Rally boats would be stacking up there like floats at the end of a parade. Oyster Yachts are a high-end sailing yacht. I can’t imagine many of them cost less than a million dollars each. Since they all arrived in French Polynesia at about the same time as all of the Puddle Jump boats, we’d all be faced with the same 90-day visa limit.

Although not far from each other, we wondered if Bora Bora could be as nice as Tahaa. I keep remembering the smile on that woman’s face in Papeete as she coached us on the proper way to say Ta’ha’a. It was like she was laughing and saying “ha-ha.” She had fun with it. We’re glad we spent time there. But we also needed Bora Bora for diesel fuel and groceries (“provisions” in yacht-speak) for the long road ahead. We also wanted good Wi-Fi (one could only hope), and to re-supply our beer cooler. And we wanted to find a cheeseburger and/or pizza. These were all things we’d been lacking lately. And of course, we needed to fill out forms and check out before our expiration date. As they say, “Thank you for coming, and thank you for leaving.”

Although I imagine relatively few have heard of Tahaa, Bora Bora is a tourist destination with hotels and restaurants and fleets of Sunsail, Moorings and Dream Yacht Charters that people fly in from all over to rent for a week or so. The two main anchorages in town are too deep for us but have a few fixed mooring buoys. When we arrived we found what we had been afraid of: all of the mooring buoys were occupied, and our anchor chain was too short for anchoring in the 100-foot depths. We cruised slowly and hopefully through the mooring fields at both the Bora Bora Yacht Club and the Mai Kai Marina, passing Puddle Jump boats we knew: Fandango, My Dream and Sweetpea; and Oyster Yachts we had been crossing paths with since Nuku Hiva: Calliope, Dalliance and Miss Tiggy. Many of the Oysters speak with British accents, and it seems that their boat names are intended to be spoken with such as well. They sound so sophisticated that way, like an expensive yacht should. We ended up anchoring in about thirty feet in a quiet bay on the far side of one of the small islands inside the lagoon; too far away, and too much intervening bigger boat traffic (choppy water), for us to make a dinghy trip to town.

The next day we were just sitting there, when we heard an outboard approaching. It was Dan from My Dream. He and a friend were out looking for the manta rays that hang out nearby. He also said that he was leaving at first light in the morning, on his way to Palmerston in the Cook Islands. We told him we wanted his mooring, and we’d be over there very early in the morning, circling like a vulture until he let it go. We were. He did, eventually. And we swooped in and snagged it.

A little while later the guys from Sweetpea dinghied over and talked for a while. They had been there for several days already and filled us in on what they knew. We could pay for the mooring at the bar in the restaurant that was right over on shore. There was a dinghy dock, but its connection with shore was “sketchy” and not recommended if you stayed too late in the bar.

So with that, we launched our dinghy, took our remaining French Polynesian cash, and went in search of answers to our questions. The dinghy dock, one of the few floating docks we’d seen in French Polynesia, was indeed a little rough. For one thing, it floated like a bobbing cork in the wind and waves, making it difficult even to just stand up on. It was held in place by a large rope tied to something on shore and a few more anchoring it to the bottom. It made no physical connection to the wooden deck in front of the restaurant and there was a gap of three to four feet. Not only were the steps up to the restaurant’s deck on the far side of this gap, but the first step was up higher and at a right angle to the dock. There were no railings of any kind; nothing to grab or lunge for. After trying to stand and stare at the problem for a while, we were finally spurred on by the two large boats tied to one side of the dinghy dock. Every time the gusting wind bashed one of them into it, the dock gave an extra lurch. We couldn’t keep standing there all day.

Interesting digression: there are only a few inches of “sun tide” in the Society Islands, with high tide at noon everyday. Due to a fluke of geography, there is virtually no “moon tide.” Docks don’t need to float up and down with the tide because there really isn’t any.

We rented the mooring for a week, and it came with use of the pool and vouchers for two free drinks. There was a laundry down the street somewhere, if we could find it. The best part about our first Bora Bora shore trip, however, was the couple of hours we spent having a cheeseburger lunch while sitting at a table just inside the open wall of the restaurant, above the wooden deck, with a sweeping view of the boats in the bay. There was a gentle cooling breeze making its way inside, but it was blowing twenty knots outside. It would’ve been rough trying to anchor that deep in that wind. Thanks Dan.

Within a day or two the Oyster yachts began departing. This opened up several moorings, but instead of quieting down the bay, the extra space seemed to give the local boats more room to drive faster and put up bigger wakes. In addition to that, we have been plagued by what I call “Air Balls.” These are sudden blasts of air, coming from seemingly random directions right out of a gentle breeze, and with a ferocious, even frightening intensity lasting mere seconds before a return to the previous conditions. They come without warning, and go just as quickly. They spin and toss the boat and tear at things aboard trying to suck them away, even the dinghy with outboard attached.

So while we had idyllic days on Tahaa, things were more boisterous on Bora Bora, especially with it being the last week of the month-long Polynesian Heiva festival. But although not so idyllic, we found everything we needed to prepare for the next leg of the trip.

With the departure of Fandango, My Dream and even Sweetpea, which was a surprise when they came to say goodbye, we are the last (as far as we know) of the Puddle Jump boats that departed from Mexico and California all at about the same time. From here our plan is to head to American Samoa, with a possible rest stop at Suwarrow. In American Samoa the rumor is we can get mail and packages sent from home as if it was just another destination within the U.S. Then, depending on how bad the Pago Pago harbor is, we may hop across the dateline to regular Samoa (formerly called Western Samoa?). We’ve heard it’s really nice there.

So, next up, I guess it will be Bora Bora to Pago Pago. Total distance to Pago Pago by way of Suwarrow: 1,140 nautical miles.