Huh. Those clouds look funny.

“Ah man, are we getting another front?”

The wind, which had blown from the northwest since about four o'clock in the morning, had died off completely over the last couple of hours. We sat in the cockpit of Saltbreaker; the sea was flat and the sky clear for the first time in several days. We had just finished dinner: dogtooth tuna chowder made by the Kleemans (Alex and Nick) with the fish they had caught the day prior and honey bread rolls made by myself. We swirled rum mixed with lime juice and sugar round in our glasses as we reminisced a bit and mused the things we looked forward to regarding our upcoming high-latitude re-entry. Alex was the first to notice the clouds.

They were a long line of cumulus, maybe stratocumulus, stretching east-west and approaching from the south. The moon was bright and we could see the dark line on the water beneath the front but couldn't tell if it was wind, rain or only the shadow. We stood on deck and watched the system lumber toward us. Just before the clouds were directly overhead, a gentle southerly breeze came up. Saltbreaker began to swing round on her anchor; I watched as Ardea, anchored two hundred feet to the east followed suit.

We could hear Saltbreaker's anchor chain drag across a coral head as she came around and set bow to the southeast.

“Errr,” as the grinding went on, “we're destroying that bommie.” Nick noted the unfortunate but unavoidable.

“Yeah. Imagine how many thousands of tiny lives are being lost down there,” I replied.

We do everything we can to avoid such occurrences, not just because we want to preserve the coral, but because getting the chained wrapped up on bommies is nothing good. It's hard to plan for these things though- there we were again watching the wind clock around contrary to the forecasts, contrary to our selection of anchorage and positions. Fortunately the wind that came wasn't strong. “Ahhh, another lee shore,” I thought to myself, reflecting on the day prior, when I had made the sixty mile sail from Vava'u to Ha'Apai.

I had spent a day and a half anchored off of Lape Island in Vava'u; it's a tiny island where thirty or so folks make there homes. I only went ashore once, taking a walk through the little village with Jess, Cal and John from Oyaragh; there were loads of little kids about, who took a break from the constant ingestion of mangoes to show us their school and collect for us some of the prolific fruit which had just come into season. You couldn't walk on any island in Vava'u without feeling the squish of mangoes under your feet.

On Thursday I pulled up the anchor and sailed a weaving course among the islands of Vava'u to Maninita, the southernmost island with a miniscule anchorage into which I pulled for the night. A large and deep depression (low pressure system) was passing to the south, so winds were from the northeast. The direction wasn't great, but I needed to get a move on before the breeze shut down for a few days following the passing of the system. The forecast was for 10 to 15 knots, northeast to north. I went to shore and walked round the island, disrupting briefly the hundreds of birds that nested there; then I jumped in the water with my spear, shot a fish for dinner, ate and went to bed.

I arose before the sun. I walked to the bow with first light, noting that the sky was licked with a splash of red. I knew the old adage, but as I hauled in anchor chain I thought, “It's really more of a pinkish color anyway.” At 0600 I was underway.

Until late morning the winds were pretty light and the angle was tough to stick. I was making only about four knots and concerned that I wouldn't make it to Ha'Ano, the northernmost island in the Ha'Apai group, by nightfall. A mild front came through, though. It brought a lot of rain but also a fresh twenty knots of breeze. I began to make up for lost time. At about 1630 I was lined up with the entry to Ha'Ano, only about a mile and a half out from the anchorage. There was not a soul around though. No other boats, no activity ashore, and the rain kept coming. I had already spent more than two days without interaction and I had another couple of hours of daylight left, so I decided to head to Lifuka, another eight miles southwest, instead of hunker down to wait out the bad weather alone.

I checked the chartplotter. There is a lot to hit in this island group. Reefs, rocks, islands all over the place. I got a bearing and went back on deck to gybe. I doused the mizzen, not needing the extra power and not wanting to deal with three sails. I got Ardea on course and was steering for a point I could just see in the distance when the rain slacked up a bit. I looked astern and saw a big frontal system moving in from the northwest. It looked like a line squall, but I didn't really think it could be one.

Soon the rain came back. This time it was pelting. Not long after, the cloud line overtook me and brought in the breeze. The visibility dropped; the island to port, only a couple of miles off, was obscured by rain and low clouds. I furled the jib and started the engine. I wanted to get out of this and I couldn't hold the bearing under sail. Rather than sail out and gybe back, I figured to motor sail under the double reefed main I still had up.

I sat there steering the boat and only when I realized that the rain drops were stinging as they struck my back did it occur to me that it was really windy. The breeze had come up to something around thirty-five knots and the swell had come up too, though it wasn't more than two meters or so. Still, it was a steep chop and I was surfing down waves at a heavy clip, forced to use a lot of rudder to keep the bow pointed down the waves. The visibility got still worse. I could only leave the helm for a few moments at a time, concerned that I might get rounded up and knocked down by the combination of heavy gusts and steep, short-period swell. I cracked the companionway open and peeked in at the plotter.

When I had set the waypoint to which I was steering, the conditions were fine; I had only to shoot a gap between the northern point of Lifuka, whose reef stuck out to the west a bit terminating in a chunk for some reason named 'Mariner Patch', and a couple of small reefs to the west. The slot was a little bit less than a quarter of a mile wide. I think it was the Mariner Patch thing that started to trip me out a bit; I'm sailing a Mariner 31, after all. It felt very ominous. Furthermore, it was then less than two miles away and I still couldn't see it. I could only make out the main spit of land just east and I watched the swell that had only just recently passed under my keel roll over and spill onto the reef that bordered the spit. I longed to be on the other side of that piece of land, sheltered from the swell, anchored and secure so I could hole up in my cabin and rest. It had been a long day. I stared out at that stretch of land and watched the breakers; I was steering the boat ceaselessly and thinking how nice it would be if my engine stuck with me on this one. I really didn't like the idea of the gap outside Mariner Patch. I began to consider my options.

I was still far enough away that I could take a harder angle on the waves without risking a knockdown and head out clear of all the rocks; from there I could gybe back and take a safer angle into shelter. For a moment it was clear that this was the best option. I quickly remembered, though, that I was running out of daylight. The added distance would eat up the rest of the light. There were far too many obstructions to navigate at night, not just into this anchorage, but really anywhere in Ha'Apai. I really could not stay out. I had to get the boat to anchor. I couldn't heave-to for I had literally no sea-room and would quickly be on the rocks. I couldn't turn back and go to the anchorage at Ha'Ano for it would mean a beat into gnarly conditions and would take hours; that anchorage offered little protection from this wind direction anyway. I had to steer my original course.

For the first time, I looked out at the reef, listened to the breakers and wondered if I would end up on it; I had never been so close on a lee shore, certainly not with a sustained thirty-five knots. I considered putting shoes on; I figured if I was going to end up on the reef, I would want to have shoes on. It wasn't a super-rational thought. There was no time anyway, though. Steering was a full time job at this stage. I was getting close. The engine was kicking with a nice beat. I checked the gauges and it looked good. I figured I would have to trust it. I waited until Ardea was in an off-the-wind portion of the undulating course she took with the swell; then I threw the cleat on the main halyard, hopped on the cabin top and got her down quick. There was time for one sail tie. I jumped back to the helm. At this stage, I had to open the companionway so that I could see the plotter from the helm. Mariner Patch had come into view but there were subsurface obstructions about and I needed to see the chart. I had to take a high angle on the waves to get some clearance on that damned Patch.

The rain was near-sideways, coming from astern and finding it's way well into the cabin. I cleared Mariner Patch, though, and I could see the beach on the leeward side of the northern point of Lifuka as I brought the helm over to port and took an angle in. I was half a mile offshore when I took a sounding; only twenty-five feet already. It was getting near dark and there was no way I'd be able to see any bommies so I couldn’t risk going in much closer. It would've been nice to have that much more protection from the swell, but already it had calmed considerably. The wind remained, but there was nothing that could be done about that with islands whose tallest trees reach barely a hundred feet above sea-level.

I rounded up into the wind and went forward. I dropped the hook and paid out a ridiculous amount of chain; I put a fender out on the chain to keep it up off the ground so that I might keep some catenary if there were coral heads down there, set the snubber and paused for a few moments.

“Well, that worked out. Got a little hairy.” That was about the extent of my thoughts on it.

I was soaked to the bone. I dropped my yellow John Deere hat in the cockpit where the mildew that had already inoculated the brim would have a chance to proliferate, threw off my harness and my soaking shorts and jumped into the cabin. I slammed the companionway shut and made a log entry. It was pitch dark by then but the cabin was suddenly lit up from lightening in the distance. I grabbed a beer and went about cooking the fillets of a bonito I had caught that afternoon; I made a sauce of fresh mangoes and papaya. I had thought that the beer would taste extra good, but it didn't; it still tasted like warm Steinlager.

I was exhausted but the wind was clocking to the west. I set an anchor drag alarm on the gps and started the timer on my watch. I'd have to get up and make checks every so often until the wind died down; I had no idea how good my holding was.

Over the course of the night the wind would go from northwest down to southwest and all the way back up again. The lightening got more frequent and the thunder was intense, but it was never nearby. At about 0330 my watch timer woke me up for a check. I peeked out and it was all over. The wind was gone, the swell gone. It was totally calm. I checked the gps. The anchor had never dragged. Ardea was right where I left her. I shut the timer on my watch off and went to sleep in my very wet cabin.

The next morning I awoke slowly and spread everything out on the cabin top to dry; the sun was out and powerful. I drank my coffee in the cockpit and looked out in the direction from which I had come. It was pleasing that I had made it in there alright; there certainly seemed to be a lot of little reefs around. I thought back to what Nate from s/v Slick had said only half-joking in the Marquesas: “There are two types of sailors. Those that have run aground and those that are about to.” I was happy to remain in the latter category. In retrospect, the ordeal wasn't all that bad, though. The wind increase was unexpected, but it was manageable and much of the drama existed only in the head of one tired sailor, exacerbated by dim light, low clouds and heavy rain. I am just glad that engine held up; I've come in to port under sail by necessity a few too many times now.

That afternoon I pulled the hook and motored down to the tiny, uninhabited island at which Saltbreaker lay. The wind was light, back at the northeast, and the high-level cirrocumulus clouds foretold more stable weather; perhaps that big low had moved well onward at last. Regardless, I was happy to drop the hook near my friends and peer around; though Ha'Apai is a nightmare to navigate even in nice conditions, there were dozens of mostly low-lying islands and reefs visible in every direction, including a couple of volcanoes to the west. It would be a good place to have our last bit of fun in the tropics.

We sat in the cockpit of Saltbreaker late into the night discussing our plans and this trip at large. It had been one hell of a ride. It was hard to believe that there we sat, only twelve-hundred miles from Opua, the symbolic finishing line for our Pacific Crossing. A week or so bumming around Ha'Apai and we'd sail a few days to Minerva Reef. Then it would be only a short wait before we'd head to New Zealand, hoping the weather would allow us to leave at such a time as we would cross the latitude on 14 November from which we could see the total eclipse of the sun. And hoping the weather would be fair enough that we could see the sky when the time came. It was decided unanimously that the weather seemed to owe us a little bit of cooperation for a change.

So many islands, so little time.

The Vava'u group in northern Tonga contains some 61 islands, most of them tiny, emanating southward from the primary, which by far the largest. I've been here for ten days now and yet for whatever reason I haven't managed to visit more than two anchorages: Port Maurelle, named for a Spaniard who landed there, I think... some white man in any case; and Neiafu, the main city, if you could call it that. I've had good reason for my lack of variety, I suppose. Mainly I just don't mind hanging for a while in one place, especially if it happens to be gorgeous and contain several of my friends.

This was the case for Maurelle when Ardea first puttered past all the gargantuan green rocks and into the island group. Sailing in was a treat, as the space of water within is quite large, but so well protected that it's like a lake. Those that have traveled in Indonesia and southeast Asia make comparisons to those places. I arrived with my crew from Niue on a Saturday afternoon, so there was no need to go up to Neiafu yet, as it would be impossible to complete the immigration process until Monday. So I sought to find some of the amigos that I hadn't seen since before that whole engine thing.

Someone has taken the time and energy to set up numerous vhf repeater antennas all over Vava'u, so, in spite of the hilly islands, one can make radio contact all across the island group on channel 26. This is both a blessing and a curse; since it thus makes sense to monitor vhf 26, one is exposed to an incredible and unceasing amount of radio traffic. In no time at all, though, I was able to get a hold of Saltbreaker, to my great delight, and catch some coordinates to their anchorage, which was, of course, Port Maurelle. We pulled in and set the hook. It turned out Gypsy Blues was there, too. The joy I felt at having finally picked up where I had left off during my three-and-a-half week engine hiatus was striking.

I pumped the dinghy up and left the Euros to bask while I promptly rowed over to Saltbreaker, where Matt from Gypsy Blues was already hanging out, to catch them up on my saga and to hear about theirs; and to drink some rum, of course. I eventually returned to eat with my crew and, after dinner, my old salty friends came over for a few more snifters and a lot more revelry.

Sunday saw what would be the first of many bonfires on the beach as I made plans to hit Neiafu and drop off my crewmembers before returning to Maurelle. Alas, a Finnish boat that I had not seen since they intervened when Ardea dragged her stern anchor toward Bombalero in Nuku Hiva, Marlileu, had pulled in. I had been in contact with Helena and Cary some time before in an attempt to organize a meeting in Tonga; Helena is a PADI dive instructor, Cary her tank-filling slave and resident joker. I was sort of shocked that it worked out, but sure enough, Maurelle would be a great spot to do the course and Matt, too, was in. We were told that it would be made cheaper if we could fill in four spots, so we immediately set about trying to convince Saltbreaker to stay, even though they had checked out of Vava'u several days prior.

I left Matt to the negotiating while I headed to town to take care of the officialdom. After about three hours of mostly waiting around for the various folks to wander by and give us paperwork, we were cleared in. I then had only to write an “official” letter to the immigration office clearing the crew from my vessel; this was, naturally, a page torn from a spiral notebook with hand-sprawled non-sense to make it seem more proper (I had had to talk my way out of being made to type it and find a printer). It all worked out and the Euros set about town to figure out their logistics while I cleaned up Ardea. We had planned to meet for lunch, but the former didn't show up (or, rather, were walking to while I was walking home), but I ran into the folks from an English boat, Oyaragh (OY-rah). I had met them briefly in Niue and ended up sitting with them. After describing my plans, Calum, the son of the couple that owns the boat, was keen to join the PADI course. The next morning I sailed back to Maurelle with Calum on board, his parents and girlfriend to follow in a day or so.

Saltbreaker had decided to stick around. Alex would do the course with us, so we had the four we'd needed; Nick and their friend David, who'd joined in Aitutaki, would spent the next days setting snare traps on the island while we dove.

We typically spent five hours or so diving and talking through the theory and what not; mid-afternoons we were released with Helena beckoning us to study the books. We usually went right back to the water though and spent a few hours spearfishing. One afternoon I had managed to get three decent-sized parrot fish and a nice goat fish. I made poisson-cru from the former and we roasted the latter on a fire on the beach along with some squirrel fish shot by Calum. That would be our last spearfishing excapade in Port Maurelle, though, since, on the following day, Nick, who had remained diligent in setting and baiting his traps, snared a pig.

While we were diving, they had gone ashore to check the snares. One of them, a simple rig using just a piece of rope, a small piece of fishing line, some twigs and a log, had snared a sizable sow, well over fifty pounds by their accounts. They killed it, gutted it and hung it from a tree to bleed out before rowing back to the boat for a stiff drink. The process had shaken them up, which explains their long faces while we, having just come up from a dive, clapped and celebrated the forthcoming feast.

We all headed in to begin the long process of butchering and cooking the pig. That first night we cooked over an open fire one of the legs, a side of ribs and a hind quarter. It was a delicious meal, but my body was not used to digesting meat anymore and in those quantities I paid for it the following day. Nonetheless, we spent another night eating pig, this time cooked in an earth-oven in the sand lined with palm leaves. One dish was slathered with loads of the fine mangoes that are found all over these islands and the other a juicy pot roast type dish. Both were grand and it took a number of cruisers to finish them all.

This brought us to Saturday morning. We had all passed our PADI exam the day prior and so set out on our final dive before being certified open-water divers. It was certainly the best dive we'd had and, as was often the case, I had to be stopped from proceeding to greater depths and the lot of us had to be coaxed to the surface at the end.

We had all by then spent so much time in Port Maurelle that we knew we had to get going. Saltbreaker took off for a southern anchorage from where they would set off for Ha'Apai; Matt, who had been crashing on Ardea to allow his parents the freedom to roam while he took the dive class, caught a ride with Oyaragh to Lape Island, where Gypsy Blues was now anchored, and I set off for Neiafu, where I would check-out of Vava'u before working my way South.

Naturally, I got hung up in town for a few days as La Luz, Caps Tres, and a few other yachtie friends are around and beer and pizza are relatively cheap. Today I head out. I'll pick a couple of spots on the way down, needing to wait for a low pressure system to work its way East before I leave anyway. Then I'll make the short (sixty miles) hop to the Ha'Apai group, the central island group in Tonga. I'll spend a week or so there before heading to Minerva Reef, another 250 miles South. There I will wait with Saltbreaker and whomever else is around for a weather window to New Zealand. I doubt if I'll see wifi again before making landfall in Opua, but at some stage I should come back into range of a winlink radio station. If I don't update, worry not; chances are I've just delayed my departure from the tropics for all of the obvious reasons. Until next time...

From there, I sailed to the Moon

“Are you ready?”

Manu cleared the water from his mask. “Oui.”

At surface level, we were treading next to a cliff face in turquoise water that was so still that it might have been mistaken for solid before in we leaped. The pool was surrounded by limestone walls that slowly converged as they climbed there way up a hundred feet leaving a long crevice for an aperture in which the sunlight spilled, filtered through leaves of pandanus, palm and fern. Beneath the surface, ten feet or so, the rock opened with a dark hole of a diameter of several times the width of our bodies.

I switched on the dive light and filled my lungs. The frenchman followed. We entered the submerged cave and traversed toward the other side where the water column began to rise again. The light shown on rock of red and gray and black, the colors mixed as though cans of paint had spilled across the expanse. I swam upward wondering if what I was seeing was the surface and knowing it had damned well better be.

Our heads popped up and all we could do was chuckle. It was insane to be in there. The hidden cave of the Vaikona Chasm. It was pitch black with the light off, except for the indigo glow of the light penetrating underwater from the entrance and emanating as though each ray was itself visible and dancing about with the others so lucky to have made it so far into the Earth. When I flashed the light across the ceiling we saw stalactites of varying dimensions and ribbons of smoothed stone shaped by the endless dripping of this watery world.

After we watched awestruck for a while we swam back out, traversed the chasm again and scrambled up a few large boulders to the sloped stretch of the cavern that led to the narrow exit. We followed the walking path the rest of the way to the sea and watched the breakers slam the eastern coastline of Niue. The whole of the island was bordered by a most rugged, sheer coastline of coral-laden limestone cliffs that were breathtaking. Each place we visited was its own unique spiritual retreat. In fact, the whole of Niue, some 60 kilometers around the perimeter but whose highest point is only 70 meters, is like a massive meditation cushion thrust out of the Pacific.

Vaikona was the last of four places we visited that day. We wandered along the path back to the car, which was itself no less magnificent being well forested but with trees growing on top of ancient coral heads and jagged rocks. It had been a very full and fulfilling day.

It began slowly, though, as had become the norm since my crew had come to consist of a couple of two English girls and Manu. We were meant to get up early and head to the market in the port town, Alofa, which we did, if an hour later than planned. The market, to be fair, was less than spectacular, not entirely surprising given an island with a population of fifteen hundred, I suppose. From there we stopped at the Niue Yacht Club, which offers coveted wifi free of charge, though, as a fellow Californian sailor described, they send passenger pigeons with your messages so it's best not to be in any kind of rush.

That morning Manu and I once again found ourselves waiting for the girls to accomplish something or another in cyberspace, or perhaps taking yet another shower, so I figured I'd venture onto the New York Times and catch up on a bit of news. I used the meantime to share with my Old World crew the happenings in the land of the free, but it was difficult for them to understand having never tasted sweet liberty. Honestly, it is a bit overwhelming to jump into the headlines from a place like Niue, and I find myself doing so less and less frequently. I will, however, wait at length to load up the Giants' scores.

When we finally managed to secure a vehicle and head about the island, we found ourselves in a series of spectacular places. The first was the Limu Pools, a beautiful spot that gave us our first glimpse of the walls of the Niue shoreline and the crystal-clear water. We swam about for a bit, sure that nothing could be better than this tranquility.

Limu Pools.

Ultimately, with little foresight, we managed to build up in spectacle throughout the day. The second stop held trail heads for two sites: the Talava Arches and the Matapa Chasm. The former we visited first and it became the new favorite; a trail wound through large caves by the seaside which opened up to a shallow reef with the same water of unreal clarity. The real treat was the massive limestone arch reaching out toward the breakers. The scene in its entirety was so incredibly unique.

Cave on the way to the Talava Arches

The Arch.

The Matapa Chasm was our pre-lunch swim spot; it was historically reserved as the bathing site for the island royalty, but on this day we had it to ourselves. It is a long almost fjord with a width of thirty feet or less and the now familiar near vertical walls. We scrambled up the walls and leaped into the brackish water among the fish that could be watched as though at an aquarium, even those that swam at the bottom.

Matapa Chasm.

From there began our real cave exploration first at the Togo Chasm no the southeast edge of the island and then at the “guide only” Vaikoma Chasm. By the end we were intimitely familiar with limestone rock formations, stalactites and their rounder, fatter cousins, the stalagmites (mites crawl on the ground... that's how I remember which is which).

The rugged coastline near the Togo Chasm.

 The next morning we hustled to two last stops nearer the wharf, the Palaha Cave and the Avaiki Cave and relished our last couple of hours in and among these spectacles of geological and marine glory. We took our last swims in the pools, all of which were worthy or royalty, and remarked at what a worthy stop was Niue. It was agreed that one could be quite content to spend a good deal more time there. The people were exceedingly kind and one consistently got the notion that each individual met, whether while hitch-hiking to the beer store, eating at a restaurant, or wandering through Alofi, cared a great deal as to whether you enjoyed yourself. We were made to feel so welcome and comfortable.

Palaha Cave

Avaiki Cave.

Sea snake!

That afternoon we made our final visit to the Niue Yacht Club, where I decided to become a member for twenty dollars New Zealand. We cleared out of immigration, loaded the boat with a few small provisions, a hefty dose of duty free booze and ice. Shortly before two in the afternoon, we cast the lines off the mooring ball and began to drift to the west. As the bow came around, I launched the genoa and off we went. I had decided not to turn the engine on at all as we waved goodbye to Niue. The damn things are so disruptive.

Ship's Log: A Quick Update

Passage sunset- High pressure approaching after 8 hours of frontal weather
associated with a low.

Amigos,

I haven't had the time to write a proper post, but thought I'd provide an update. We had a fine, quick five day sail over 580 miles from Rarotonga to Niue- "the rock"- with a great breeze and a pretty decent seastate across a portion of the Pacific sometimes known as The Dangerous Middle. I found it quite nice in spite of the moniker, though we weren't able to land any of the several fish strikes we had, to our great disappointment and to the loss of several more lures. Only had to run the Perkins for an hour or two coming out of and then into harbor, but it worked just fine.

Niue has been a wonderful if whirlwind experience. I will take the time to write more about it en route to Tonga. We've only been here two and a half days but must carry on as time in the tropics is running out. Only 250 miles to Vava'u Group in northern Tonga where I'll drop the Euros off and rush to catch up with my buddies.

More soon.

Cheers,

Connor

Ardea moored in the lee of The Rock.

She purrs!

Engine is back in, everything is connected, and Ardea is getting the hell out of Raro!

I've adopted a crew for the passage to Tonga. There is another boat here, Donna, with a disabled rudder and no clear trajectory for getting going again any time soon. She has three crew that joined the boat for a while and pay a daily rate to tag along with the skipper. They're stranded and have become friends in our mutual plight against the fragility of seafaring. So, I have agreed to take them to the Vava'u group in northern Tonga after a short stop in Niue. Yes, it will be ridiculously cramped in my little boat, but the bright side is very easy watch schedules and a French chef!

Hopefully I will be in range of a winlink station so I can start posting position updates and blog posts from sea again. Otherwise, I'll check back in at Niue in about five days (600 nm from here).

Until then...