Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.

I am first obliged to say that I am wracked with guilt over the incident that I'm about to relate. It's all my fault; unfortunately, Captain Hindsight doesn't save sailboats, but it seems so obvious now how it all should have been avoided. Wait, don't freak out. Ardea is fine. But it was a close one; I got very lucky in the outcome regarding a situation that I should have foreseen, but that I remain tempted to say was bathed in a vat of unluck.

We sailed from Uoleva back to the harbor at Pangai in anticipation of strong northerly and westerly winds courtesy of the tropical storm that had formed near Minerva Reef. We sought protection for Ardea and Saltbreaker. Two boats were already in the harbor, both of whom were friends, and a number of others had decided to sail sixty miles North back to the Vava'u group to wait it out. Unfortunately, all four boats had to cram into the southern part of the harbor as the ferry and freighters needed room to maneuver. All four of us were anchored bows pointing West with our sterns tied to large ships' stanchions ashore. Ardea was on the northern edge of the group, two anchors out, stern facing the rocky shoreline, which came to a point off her port quarter before angling East. When we first arrived, the winds were from the predominant direction, east-southeast, so it was our stern lines that held our boats in place. The next day, the wind backed to a northerly and built; it was blowing 25 to 30 knots, gusting a touch higher, and slowly but surely became a northwester by the evening. The breeze was unabating.

I went to bed feeling uneasy as the rain came down in sheets. I hated to have those rocks so near to my stern; the wind showed no signs of letting up, and we didn't expect it to do any such thing until it had made its way to a southwest direction. I couldn't really pinpoint it, but I felt uncomfortable. I was stressed out. I was worried. I think we all were, but we didn't really talk about it.

I woke up suddenly at about 0415. It's hard to say exactly why- a combination of noise and motion and the fact that something changed, I suppose- but I opened my eyes, lying in my berth in a cabin battened down as the rain continued to come down in torrents. It was windier. A squall had come up. That is where the processing in my weary brain had got when I heard the awful, horrible, gut-wrenching sound of Ardea scraping. The adrenaline was in my blood and I was out of my berth like a bat out of hell. I threw the companionway open and launched myself into the dark and rainy night. The wind whipped me with raindrops but I was completely unaware; somewhere in the process I managed to put a massive bruise on the back of my left shoulder but I have no idea when or how. I had only one thought, just one goal. I fired the engine and gunned it in forward; the scraping hadn't continued the whole time, but I wanted away and fast. When I was well-off, I brought the throttle back a bit and, with it still in forward, went forward to haul in some anchor chain. Only then did I notice that someone was on the deck of each of my three neighboring boats; I would later learn that I was the only one who scraped, but the squall had brought everyone from their slumber.

I was soaking wet, cold and exhausted, but it didn't matter. There was no way I would be getting back to sleep. I sipped coffee as the sun rose and ran through it all over and over in my head. How stupid of me to fail to put the scenario together ahead of time. It was the hardest blow of the storm, hitting forty knots, and the direction from which the wind came put me stern to the little rocky point of the shoreline. My anchors didn't drag, but they didn't need to. The heavy winds put me hard on the catenary and the rodes were stretched back; all it took to make me scrape was that last bastard of a factor: the tide. The squall had managed to come at low tide, push me towards the nearest rocks and stretch my anchor lines so I was as far astern as I could get. And Ardea has taken such good care of me. Even writing this now, I could cry at the idiocy of my oversight.

When the sun came up the wind was already backing to the west-southwest, so I was no longer just forward of the rocky point. Even so, I rowed out and put a third anchor out and hauled Ardea further toward the middle of the basin. Three anchors. That was certainly a first. My boat was secure, though, and it bought me a lot of peace of mind.

After breakfast, I dove the rudder to inspect the damage. Thankfully, it appears as though the rudder never came down on top of a rock. There is merely some paint scraped away from the side; I pushed and pulled fore and aft to check the shaft and all seemed well. Luck. I had been very lucky. I am ashamed to have let it come to that. I should have put that third anchor out the night before; I had felt uneasy. I had consider hauling in some more rode that night but was worried that if I pulled in too much the anchors would drag, which could have been much worse. The third anchor. It wasn't getting anything done sitting in the lazerette. I risked my boat for what would have been fifteen minutes' work. Shameful.

I had gotten away with one, to be sure, and resolved to learn from the mistake, for what else could be done? I also thought back to the Drifter's Net, which I had listened to with Saltbreaker the night before; some of the boats reporting their positions were really in the thick of it, with Adventure Bound reporting 10 meter seas and 55 knot winds. On that thought, I could really count my blessings and try to move on. In any case, the winds were making there way South and dissipating.

The tropical storm never quite reached the status of named-storm, though it came very close. In fact, we weren't quite sure exactly where the cutoff was and in learning that it was at sustained winds of 64 knots, we also found the list of names for this year's storms. Actually, there are several lists, apparently to keep a little anticipation involved. The first storm takes a name that begins with "a", of which my favorite of those available was, Amos. Alas, Amos is yet to be, but the storm that shall remain nameless is one we and our cohort will not soon forget.

With the triple-anchor setup holding strong, I felt comfortable enough to head to Blue House with Alex to pick up a to-go order (nobody felt comfortable leaving the boats for long...). We called over to Oyaragh and Tamarin on the vhf and before long found ourselves picking up fried chicken and beer for four boats' crews.

I sat on Saltbreaker enjoying our now ritualistic mid-day meal, drinking beer and watching the weather. It really dominates things for a sailor, the weather, especially when it's bad; on that day, we had nothing else to talk about. Sometimes the conversation would follow a tangent one way or another, but always it would come back after a gnarly gust or a wind-shift or an anchor line screaming it's high-pitched whine under load. We would chat about the barometer (which had dropped 12 millibars in 14 hours, bottoming at 999 mb, for those of you to whom that means something), the clouds, the temperature; I would often come back to chastising myself for having let my boat find rocks. As one beer became two, though, then three, then rum, we realized we were gradually feeling better about it all. The instruments on Saltbreaker assured us that gusts were still hitting thirty knots, from time to time, but we were convinced of the power of booze in dissipating the weather. As the sun was going down, the wind really had dropped off to the high teens and moved southwest, so our boats were not so threatened. We moved on over to Ardea and I whipped up some pasta and opened up a bottle of bourbon. We'd pulled up GRIB files from Ha'Apai to New Zealand; the tropical storm was moving on, and our time had finally come. We figured we may as well have ourselves a send-off; I had been up since well-before dawn, though, so while we managed to kill half the bottle, I was out cold before too long.

Sure enough, the winds backed to the southeast and the forecast was rather good. For the second time, we headed to town to stock up on fresh mangoes, carrots, onions, potatoes, peppers and a few other fresh provisions. That afternoon, 09 November, I weighed three anchors, one from the dinghy, one (the Danforth) standing on the sea floor and hauling it up with all my might, as it was too dug in to pull up from the dinghy, and the third as normal. I had the engine running just in case, but never had to put it in gear. With anchors up and everything ready to go, I waved goodbye to Saltbreaker and the Tongan kids on the quay, unfurled the jib, hoisted the main and was underway, inbound for Opua, Bay of Islands, New Zealand.

The first night on passage was a tiring one; it wasn't until after sundown that I was west of the majority of the Ha'Apai islands, but there were still a few obstructions that I had to watch for. I sailed close hauled and slept in 25 minute intervals. At one point after dark, I was lying in the settee berth and I heard a strange thump. I had a visitor; this time, it was a type of shearwater, I think. I assumed the bird meant to take a rest on Ardea and stumbled into the cabin by accident. It was stuck, though, since it couldn't hop high enough to get out and it's wingspan was much to large to be of use in the cabin. I grabbed a towel, gently put it over the bird's body, and placed him in the cockpit. He hopped around a bit, jumping from the seat to the floor of the cockpit, and I went back to my berth. Soon, though, he was back inside. It was chilly out there, I thought. So, as the bird walked up and down the cabin floor unperturbed by me, I set up the towel for him on the floor at the base of the v-berth. Before long, he found it and settled in. I was a little annoyed since I knew that it was a foregone conclusion that he would defecate with no regard for my teak, but I hadn't the heart to turn him out. I decided to call him Amos. We were both tired, though, and interacted little that night.

As the sun began to rise, the wind was up a little and Ardea had found the ocean swell, the last islands of Ha'Apai visible to port. I'd lost track of Saltbreaker's lights sometime in the night, but they were around somewhere. When I got up to check the horizon just after dawn, the noise of my movement woke Amos up. He'd been sleeping forward where the light remained very low and was, I think, a bit embarrassed to have slept so late. He began wandering up and down the cabin floor again, for a while exploring the cave underneath the settee table and once again confirming that he could not open his wings fully anywhere.

"Time to go fishing, huh?"

I went and got the towel and Amos fussed little this time around. I picked him up, walked him to the companionway and placed him in the cockpit. He walked toward the stern, stopped and looked at me for a few moments. Then he took off and began his day of scooping up and down, careening among the waves only a few feet from the surface, searching. I went back to bed.

As I got more south a fairly big swell was running from the southeast, probably three meters or so. The wind was nice, a fresh fifteen knots, also southeast. It was a little less than ideal to have to sail close-hauled or close-reached, but the big swell was beautiful. I sat in the cockpit for several hours today just watching it.

I was under full sail all night, but slowly took in canvas throughout the day. Now I am making about six knots under a reefed mizzen, a double-reefed main, and about half the genoa. The swell seems to be dissipating a bit, but the deck remains wet, with water coming over the bow and running over the starboard toe-rail every couple of minutes. There's nothing more to hit until Minerva, though, which I will pass on Monday (Sunday in the U.S.- I crossed the dateline on the way to Tonga). I'll only stop there if something changes with the weather, as the window is for now looking good to go straight to Opua. At this stage, I anticipate arriving on Monday 19 November. All is well aboard, despite the upwind sailing, which has become unusual but which brings fond memories of the Bay. Ardea seems to be holding up to the swell very nicely, I've managed to cook a decent meal without flying across the cabin, and I am currently ahead one sunken ship to none in a multi-day SSB radio Battleship duel with Saltbreaker, though I only sunk their frigate. I'm trying to enjoy these last few days in the warm weather, though it already seems to be getting cold; I was wearing a fleece under my deck-harness during the day today! In spite of the cold, I am mainly just excited to knock out this last passage and be in New Zealand; just over one thousand miles to go.

*Posted via radio; Shiptrak position updated

Still waiting.

Hey folks,

Ardea remains at anchor in Uoleva. There is a low pressure system forming over the next few days just west of Minerva Reef with winds up to Force 9 or 10 (something in the range of 45-55 knots sustained) so it was a rather easy decision to remain here and wait it out. We are likely to see westerly winds in the 25 knot range as the system materializes, but this anchorage has good holding and a reef providing at least some protection from the West.

This system is the first such tropical depression to develop this season; such depressions are the types of systems that can turn into cyclones and some New Zealand based weather gurus indicate this may well turn into the first named storm of the season. Anyway, if you care to see the information I'm getting via my radio here on the boat, the following are a few sources with essentially the same information.

1. http://metbob.wordpress.com

This is the Bob McDavitt weekly weathergram, which provides great overview information of what's happening in the southwestern Pacific. I can download the text of these updates using my radio.

2. www.passageweather.com

This website uses the GSF weather model. Though it displays the data slightly differently, I can get the same model data for a rectangular area that I define using the radio (these are sent as GRIB files). If you follow the menus on the site to Oceania you can see surface (pressure) charts, wind charts and wave charts for various times. Note that once you push the model beyond 72 hours, the confidence level diminishes very rapidly.

3. New Zealand Met Service

I'm not sure what the website is called, but if you do a search for "NZ Met Service Future Maps" you'll find the surface pressure/wind charts that cover a broad area that includes Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Tonga, New Caledonia, etc. If you look now you'll see a Low forming in the southwestern portion of the Tasman Sea, a strong High above NZ, a strong High well East of NZ, and the Low forming by Minerva (approx. 20 S, 175 W). Until you go out to 48 or 72 hours, the Low by Minerva looks like little more than a dip in the isobar toward the South Pole. Know that the wind direction generally follows the pressure isobars, the closer together isobars are drawn, the higher the resulting winds; also, Lows spin clockwise in the Southern Hemisphere and Highs spin counterclockwise. These maps I can receive using the radio as weather fax (the difference from the above two being that I need only to have computer software that decodes an incoming sound signal, like a phone-based fax, whereas for GRIBS or for sending this blog update, I have to be able to control the radio with the computer, a more complicated, time- and electricity-consuming process).

With any luck, the Low will move on a SSE course after forming late Wednesday and the High that is East of NZ right now will weaken or move on so that the High that is behind it doesn't get stalled out over NZ. If those things happen, we (i.e., Ardea, Saltbreaker, and a few other boats around these parts) will head out on Friday or Saturday, capitalizing on the winds following the tropical Low. From here it is about 350 miles to Minerva. If the Tasman Low doesn't find it's way to the northern part of the North Island of NZ by Monday, we'll have to wait a day or two in Minerva so as to avoid encountering that system too close to landfall in Opua. If it does get up there, which is what predictions are calling for, then we'll skip Minerva and carry on, passing through that front several hundred miles north of NZ where there is nothing to hit should we need to heave-to in heavy winds and wait it out. It would be a shame to miss out on Minerva, but right now we'd rather time things so that we'll hit about 29 S on 14 Nov. so we have a shot at seeing the total solar eclipse from sea.

Until then I will continue to mosey about, swimming, reading, watching pirated t.v. series and taking care of little projects on the boat that I don't really care to be doing but that are nicely occupying my time. I'm sort of pushing through my fresh provisions so eating may get pretty boring by the time I am actually sailing to NZ, but I don't much care- at least it will mean having to forfeit less to the NZ agricultural inspectors.

So far, attempts to have Blue House fried chicken delivered to us by fellow cruisers have failed. I'll update again when we know we can leave Tonga, or if anything exciting happens in the next few days, though that seems unlikely. Until then, I remain a nowhere man, officially not in Tonga, not at sea, not in New Zealand, not anywhere. Except Uoleva. I'm in Uoleva. I haven't gone to shore in two days, though, because I just haven't bothered to; it's weird when you get to that point as a sailor, not going to shore even though there's a perfectly good shore right there. In fact, it's one of the nicest beaches I've seen on this trip. It's all sandy, though.

Sincerely,

Connor

Sing Reverently

The upper level trough that had burst onto the scene while I'd been heading for landfall in Ha'Apai had moved on. The surface pressure charts were as clean as I had ever seen them; a little low brewing in the Tasman Sea, but otherwise a big swath of nothing. A weak high was moving east but remained in the higher latitudes and over all of Tonga there was not drawn a single isobar. The wind was gone, the sky mostly clear, the sun blazing.

I tied Tuerto to the wharf and walked across the dry gray dirt of Pangai. In a moment, I was sweating in the afternoon heat; in Tonga, folks where shirts, a practice I've begrudgingly joined along with other sailors to avoid offending people. I don't like it though, not one bit. Summer is quickly approaching and it has gone from hot to hotter, especially with the wind having taken a few days off. Thankfully, these islanders remain unconcerned with one's choice of bare feet.

It is interesting to see these minor cultural differences moving westward. The most glaring change, as any cruising sailor will note, is with regard to religion. There is an increasingly wide and thorough adoption of various Christian traditions as one moves from French Polynesia to the West. In Tonga, the effects on life and culture are obvious; most notably, Sunday is here treated with great seriousness and it is said that some locals would be outright offended to see folks doing basically anything, from swimming to boat work, on God's day. Nobody has tried to push a religious agenda on me or anyone I know, though, but we don't go about with flagrant disregard for their traditions; among sailors we do joke about the irony of the historical efficacy of missionaries in the South Pacific given the largely irreligious cohort who now sail among these islands. In any case, it is presumed that such cumbersome practices as the wearing of shirts in public places have emanated from the spiritual lore once carried to these islands by those old European navigators. I thus blame Christianity for my profuse sweating and now very smelly t-shirts.

Saltbreaker's crew was standing in the sun by the shore when I walked up. We started walking into town; Pangai is a very small town on a very small island, but it is the city-center of Ha'Apai and presumably the reason that the island, Lifuka, on which it is built would be later referred to by a man on the nearby even smaller island of Uoleva as "the mainland". A road passes by the wharf and underneath some ironwood trees that appear to play a role of great importance in the Pangai social scene given the near constant presence of a bevy of local men who there sit, sometimes playing chess, sometimes chatting, sometimes doing absolutely nothing. Across from the grove is a small concrete building with large portals to an interior with long, wide tables for displaying goods and adorned with the words "Fish Market" and "Paid for by Aus-Aid." Though there are almost always vegetables available for purchase, we have never seen a fish in the market. In fact, none of the lingering indications of fish is present, no smell, no scales from cleaning, no melted ice.

Past the market is the customs/immigration/post office. Pangai stands as having had the simplest, quickest and altogether most pleasant officialdom experience in the whole of the Pacific from my perspective. The customs agent simply took my Vava'u clearance form and asked how long I would be staying. Thinking I was in for passport checks and paperwork and probably some hassle for having taken over a week to get there since checking out of Vava'u, I told him a few days before I'd clear for New Zealand. He responded with, "Ok. You can do that." There was a long pause as I sat looking at him and awaiting his next command. Eventually, I said, "That's it?" to which he replied, "Yes. That's it. Come back before you leave." Checking out was equally simple and it was free, making Ha'Apai a much better place to officially depart Tonga than the more common departure point of Tongatapu.

On the next street there are a few Chinese shops, ubiquitously referred to as such because they're owned by some Chinese folks, not because they sell anything Chinese. In fact, they carry little at all. They have the important things though, and for these I walked in with Alex, Nick and David that afternoon; we grabbed a couple of cold beers apiece and a snack of roasted peanuts, enjoying the label with the Mr. Peanut knockoff and a banner reading, "Made With Pure Salt!" We had little to do on that hot day in the little town; we paid at the counter and, walking out, I asked, "Well, shall we go loiter down by the wharf?". It was getting to late afternoon. We sat on a bench under the shade of an ironwood tree and watched some local kids at play. A pig wandered up and started rolling in a puddle of mud before being chased off by a dog. We drank our beers and chatted. This was the Ha'Apai experience. It could have been considered boring except that we knew better than to take for granted our remaining time with that pace of life, that quietude, that climate; and we were content with our indolence.

A few more beers, some ice cream and some unaccounted time consumed, we four walked down the road to the restaurant. It is called Mariner's Cafe after the voyager William Mariner, for whom many things here, including the odious Patch by which I had sailed, are named. There is another food joint in Pangai that is open for lunch and serves for the equivalent of about three dollars the best fried chicken, I dare say, in the South Pacific; it is not really a restaurant, but a blue house with a menu hanging next to the door. It has no name, but we quickly became regulars and, needing to refer to it over the course of the three or four days we were in Pangai, we came to call it Blue House. It was, after all, the only blue house around.

Mariner's Cafe fits well into the set of establishments scattered across the cruising routes that by virtue of location, price, accommodation and lack of alternatives become places where sailors convene. We sat around a table in the covered rear patio playing chess and awaiting our hamburgers. After a few rounds and a leisurely meal we slowly got up to leave, not knowing where we were going next. It was dark by then. The only thing we could think to do, after we had stopped by the Chinese store for some beers, was to see about finding some kava.

Across the street from the Chinese store some guys that looked about our age were sitting on a stoop. We walked over to them and exchanged brief pleasantries before I asked casually, "Do you know where we can find some kava?" One of the characters, Stephen, looked up at us from his seat on the curb by the stoop.

"You want to drink kava-Tonga?"

"Yeah." For some reason they all called it "kava-Tonga." Stephen and the others talked amongst themselves in Tongan for a minute or two. Then, Stephen and two others stood up and beckoned us to follow them.

"Ok. We go drink kava-Tonga."

Later we would remark how incredibly easy that had been, but at the time we just followed Stephen down the street, chatting. It turned out he was in the Navy, though he and everyone else called it the Army, possibly because they have no boats. He didn't look much like he was in the Navy, being that he wore a sleeveless white undershirt, shorts and flip-flops. He took us back to the Naval Base by the wharf, which, in spite of the sign on the fence that said "Naval Base," was referred to by Stephen and the others as the Army Base. We walked through the gate, which was unlocked, and across the grounds to the open building where there were a few wooden cots in one room and a ping-pong table in the other room. It started to become clear that Stephen's uniform was actually very well matched to the Navy of which he was a part.

We stood out on the porch chatting with one of Stephen's friends while he and a few others folded up the ping-pong table, swept the floor of the room and unrolled a woven grass mat. They got two buckets and filled one of them with water from the cistern. Then they took a long sort of mesh bag to use as a filter and poured in the off-white powder that is the ground-up root of the kava plant. We sat down on the kava mat with the four Tongan men after they had made up a batch and brought a large bowl of it inside. We drank the kava from a halved coconut shell, which had been buried in the sand for several days so that it gained a black color and an ivory-like sheen. The taste was quite bitter, but not overpowering.

The coconut shell was passed around time and time again and the Tongans told us about the tradition of kava drinking among other banter. The kava circle is a men's affair in Tongan society, though on some nights they would get a woman to do the preparing and serving of the drink and would pay her tips at the end; on many such nights the kava circle would go on until near sunrise. It was a jovial and, at least in Pangai, a very frequent social event, though we would learn that, at least in part because kava itself provides a mildly sedative effect, the circle is often fairly quiet. If one desired another round of kava he needed only to clap once; we were instructed on this clap, which was to occur at chest level and with slightly cupped hands so as to produce a unique sort of muffled, low note.

As we drank and talked, other men trickled in. Before too long, there were fifteen or so Tongans and we were going through literally gallons and gallons of kava. Eventually, one of the men that joined the circle recognized us; earlier that day, we had been sitting in the cockpit of Saltbreaker, which was med-moored so that it was only a few feet from shore, playing instruments and singing songs. He asked if we were the ones that were singing songs and, once confirmed, told everyone around something of the matter in Tongan. David and Nick are the real musicians and Alex can hold his own in a jam, too. Soon the former were being asked repeatedly to go and retrieve their instruments and play songs for the crowd. Promises were made to alternate, with the sailors playing a song then the Tongans playing one. These promises were eventually broken, but they would have said anything to get David to agree; he, being the only decent, if shy, singer, was the most hesitant.

Finally they went and grabbed the guitar, the uke, the Brazilian uke-like thing, and the little breath-powered keyboard that Saltbreaker carries. The kava-drinkers were delighted, exclaiming that the musicians would now direct the kava drinking; after each song, we would all drink kava. So it went. After a number of melodies the Tongans began to peruse through the large songbook that was also brought in from Saltbreaker. Those that couldn't get their hands on the book shouted out requests. Mainly things like Celine Dion, Phil Collins, Kenny Rogers and other pretty bad pop-rock hits from the eighties and nineties. Given that it was a room full of grown men, we found it pretty comical how ubiquitous was their taste for slow love-songs of that era.

Eventually they began to find some songs in the book that they liked. The first one, graciously played by Saltbreaker, was Swing Low Sweet Chariot, to which all of the Tongans attempted to sing along, though none actually knew all of the words. I couldn't help cracking up when the chorus struck and suddenly there were more than a dozen voices booming "Swing low, sweet chariot... carry me home!" Not long after, the few Christmas songs in the book were discovered. The first requested was Joy to the World, which was sung with equally piecemeal though enthusiastic contributions from the group. The sailors laughed at the note above the written music, which normally describes the intended tempo and such (e.g., "Moderately" or "Softly" or "Quick") but, in this case, read, "With Spirit." The song sort of tapered off mid-way, though, as David simply couldn't bring himself to sing with the requisite spirit, and none of the Tongans could remember any more of the words.

After that little number, we sailors looked at one another, silently acknowledging the comedy of being coaxed with so much enthusiasm into singing gospel songs and the like, which would otherwise have been very unlikely to see any air time in our circle of friends. It was clear that we all felt the inward awkwardness as the next song request came in from across the room. Silent Night was it, and much excitement the prospect brought; the note on the page this time read, "Sing Reverently." I adored the juxtaposition and the beautiful irony of it all, watching these Christian Tongans become infused with energy as the songs got more religious. I suppose it was pretty key that they remained unaware that we didn't quite share the sentiment (my sarcasm was not picked up when I shouted at David, "More spirit, dammit!" but several Tongans concurred), but we certainly got a good kick from the novelty: playing Christmas songs for a circle of Tongans while drinking kava at the Naval base. What?

The gesture was truly appreciated. We're pretty sure they enjoyed some of the other songs David and the Kleeman brothers played as well. In any case, we had a great time, but by midnight were exhausted. We told them we were beat and they laughed as, to them, the night was young and the kava circle just getting started. They expressed real concern for our safety as we went to leave, as though the kava had us highly impaired. It did not. Not in the least. When I was about to leave, though, the guy next to me looked at me very seriously and asked, "Are you alright?" I replied that I was fine, but when I went to stand, he held out his hands anyway as though I might just topple over. We had ingested quite a bit of kava but the only noticeable effects were a slight numbing of the tongue and gums and a little bit of a sedate feeling. It remains unclear how much of the liquid one would have to ingest before he really would be capable of toppling over or failing to make it home.

Before we left Pangai, we saw one of our friends from the kava circle at Blue House and asked him where we could buy some of the powder; this after having already asked at the vegetable market, where they had run out of kava but had pointed us on to what would become a string of stores, each of whom said they had none but pointed us on to the next store. The guy at Blue House said, "Yeah. Remember Stephen? Go down to the Army base and ask him to buy some. It's five dollars for a bag." A bag makes twenty liters and by dollars, he meant ponga, which exchange at about 60 cents to the US dollar. We laughed again at the irony at being sent to the Naval base essentially to buy drugs.

Sure enough, Stephen, who looked pretty kava-brained at the time, would be able to help us out; he sent the young lad who hung around playing ping-pong at the base to pick us up a few bags and told us that he had been up until four in the morning drinking kava-Tonga. He had awoke at six o'clock, raised the flag on the flag pole and picked up some of the rubbish in the compound.

The little boy came back with the bags of kava for us and Stephen passed them over. We chatted a little more with our Tongan friend. It was early afternoon and clouds had rolled in over Lifuka. Stephen looked out with glassy eyes and said, "Good weather for drink kava-Tonga." We laughed and asked him what he was going to do today. "Nothing," he replied, "cook food." We laughed again at the Navy man before we set off from the base; we walked slowly, for it was just another day in Ha'Apai. The clouds brought a welcome respite from the heat, the children ran around, the old men played chess under the trees by the market, the dogs chased the pigs and we had some loitering to do down by the wharf.

**Posted via radio.

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.