Sailing from Palmerston to Tonga and our visit there.

We set off towards Tonga, mid day I think it was. In no time at all disaster struck. The hydraulic pump for the Auto pilot decided to quit on us. We would have to hand steer the next 600 odd miles. This is a tiring job especially if there are heavy winds and sail changes have to be made, because it means that the person who is trying to get some shuteye will be woken up to do the work. We also didn't know if our new crew member could steer. She'd told us that she'd done a sailing course, but as we all know this does not mean much till you can actually test the person out. To top it all Ros was feeling the effects of seasickness and had been feeling really awful. Shame I felt so sorry for her, but we assured her that day three would have her feeling normal again. Even though she was so ill, Ros took the wheel for her 4 hour stint and David quickly saw that she was well capable of steering puddytat.
So for the next 5 days we did 6, 10, 2 watches, taking turns at the wheel and with one of us sleeping in the salon to be able to assist whoever was steering if needed.

We saw something in the water. It looked like little tiny critters, millions of them.

We had winds that made Puddytat sail at 11 to 13 knots, but then there were more times when we were moseying along at 3 to 4 knots. We wanted to come into Neiafu in daylight and so had to sit off the island, hove-to for almost two hours till the sun came up. We also lost an entire day on this trip because the international dateline goes right over Tonga. Our log book goes from Friday the 25th to Sunday the 27th in an instant. :-) We sailed into the bay at Neiafu looking for a certain yacht called Kudana. On board this yacht are my parents who're doing the sailing thing as well. Even more exciting was that I hadn't seen them since August 2008 AND today was my Mom's birthday.

Coming around the corner and heading for the bay.

David spotted their yacht and we turned towards them. Soon we were alongside and I yelled "Mangwanani Kudana", which means Good morning Kudana. Then I sang Happy Birthday toooooo yoouuuuuu! to my Mom while she stood on deck and cried with happiness... at least I hope it was happiness. :-) It was soooo great to see them again. My Mom sure got a huge surprise for her birthday.

As soon as we had our anchor set, they came across in their dinghy. Huge hugs and tears all around and lots and lots of catching up. I'd made a pearl bracelet and a small pin cushion for her. I'd also made a 4 link chain mail copper bracelet for her to wear all the time. It would help her arthritis. We spent the morning and some of the afternoon with them, but then tiredness caught up with us and we just had to have a nap.

My Mom on Kudana when we arrived.. she was really surprised to see us.

The week in Neiafu passed in a blur. We were cleared in with Immigration, Customs, Health and Quarantine, then we were allowed ashore to explore the town. It's a sweet town with the Fruit and veg. market dominating the center alongside a craft market filled with some really well and beautifully made things. The post office is situated in an old colonial type building that doesn't need air-conditioning as it is so well ventilated. We ate out at a super little restaurant called the Coconet, where the food is excellent and the service top notch. My folks showed us around and soon we were at home.

The entrance of  Swallows Cave.

David dragging the dinghy and swimming out.

Friday came and we realised that we'd better make a move to get out of there if we wanted to be in New Zealand for Christmas. David went a cleared out of the Vava'U group of islands then we made a quick visit to the Swallow cave. We dinghied in and fell into the water.. WOW the place is teaming with fish, and the stalactites are quite spectacular. We then snorkeled back to the boat dragging Limo behind us.

Huge 5 ft coral.

These are from the snorkel back to Puddytat from the cave.

A Beautiful Bun Starfish.

A sea urchin trying to hide.

Puddytat from on high, David took a photo of us...

We also did a quick a visit to Bay 27 to see some friends of ours who we'd last seen in Mexico. What a great reunion we had that night. They told us of a spectacular snorkeling spot in bay 16, so Sunday morning we motor-sailed over to this bay and enjoyed a quiet snorkel. We were the only ones there. So restful and peaceful.

The snorkel was not a simple one. we had to swim over the top of a reef to get to the outside. There was only about 3 feet of water clearing the reef and the waves were breaking over it, so it was quite a swim to get out there. We were a tad worried that when we went back we might get tumbled and then be badly scratched on the corals. But as it was we had a delightful swim and saw a veritable garden of corals and fish, all shapes sizes and colours, then pretty much body surfed our way back over the top, into calm waters and had an energetic swim back to Puddytat. Whew my legs were a tad tired after that, but I felt so great from the exercise.

The next morning, Monday we lifted our anchor and set sail towards Nuku'alofa on the island of Tongatapu. We had a good 10 knot wind to start off with and as the day drew on the wind got stronger to about 15 knots. Poor Ros was not feeling good when the weather picked up, she went to sleep in the saloon, she'd already done her watch so all was good. We decided to anchor every night at a different island, and this we did. The first was called Moungaone. The next night was stopped at Nomuka iki and now we are approaching Nuku'alofa on the Tonagtapu Island.

Here we will be clearing out of Tonga and also applying for my visitors visa for New Zealand at their consulate. We will also stock up with fresh fruit and veg for the 10 day trip to NZ. We plan to stop at a reef called Minerva Reef for a day or two to have our last snorkel in warm water and maybe meet up with Kudana who are also on their way to NZ.

I have to go and supervise Ros at the wheel now, we are nearing the harbour and there are many reefs to negotiate before we can drop the anchor. By the way, Ros soon found her sea legs again and is feeling great.... :-)

cheers for now.

Sailing to and experiencing Palmerston Island... in the Cook Island chain.

Sailing to Palmerston. David decided that we should do more than one Cook Island so Palmerston became our next choice.
The wind...hmmm what's that? we haven't seen any lately... sigh... so we're creeping along at about 2 knots and at times when the wind dies completely we put the engine on, get the batteries charged and get a little further down the way at the same time. At least the weather is warm, nice a balmy actually. Our distance covered from dusk to dawn was a whopping 28 miles and 18 of those was done under engine :-( Thank heavens this isn't a long trip.

Dawn at 06:44

A little later at 07:05

Sunrise at 07:11

Half a Paw paw for breakfast.

So finally in the late hours of the second night the wind came to visit. I could switch the engine off and set the genoa. At last we were sailing at a decent speed. 6.5 knots.
By the time I handed over my watch to David at 02:00 the wind seemed here to stay. About time! We arrived at Palmerston at 11:30 after experiencing a Squall of note.

David writes in the log book "As we closed on Palmerston we were met by a 6 mile long rain cloud. I got nervous as the wind squall rose to the mid twenties and I dropped the main - but this was as strong as the wind got - we could have sailed it, especially if we had payed off onto a broad reach - or we could have put in 2 reefs when we first sighted it - but then I thought we were going to miss it. As it was we were basically lying abeam with the genoa out ( flapping) going nowhere."

I was chuffed though because I'd made this rain catcher and when I heard the rain thundering down I leapt out of bed and started to catch it in jerry jugs. We caught at least 10 gallons .. yay!

Once at Palmerston we were hailed by radio by a chap called Simon who directed us to a great mooring. It had two pick up lines that we could attach, one to each hull. The lines were attached to chain which was wrapped around coral on the sea bed. The water is crystal clear and it's easy to see way down. David went for a swim to check out the mooring and make sure it was in good nick. It was in very good nick, they also kept the chains from damaging the corals by tying a buoy to them and so lifted them off the bed. The sea bed is coral as far as the eye can see. We swam, snorkeled for an hour, experienced no end to the corals and a lot of amazingly huge parrot fish, amongst others. I saw a Moorish idol that was at least as big as a dinner plate. Definitely the largest I've ever seen. So beautiful.

Arriving at Palmerston island.

Anyway I digress :-) Edward, who is Simon's brother, came out in a motor boat to make sure everything was okay. He then told us that he'd be bringing the officials out to the boat to check our paperwork. I made a Key Lime Pie and put it in the freezer to chill.
Eventually they arrived and proceeded to sort out the paperwork. When all was done we offered them a cool drink and a slice of pie. They invited us ashore right there and then, so we went.

Gorgeous Beach.

Facing the other way...

On palmerston you cannot go ashore yourselves, Edward will come and get you and deliver you back to your boat. There are other people who act as hosts on the island but with us it was Edward. The reef around the island is rather convoluted and seems rather difficult to negotiate as it's not marked, so I reckon that it's safer to leave it to the locals. The island is inhabited by 65 people who are members of three families. 29 of them are children in school. Their school is great, cool and airy and seems well equipped. They have a computer and internet so that the children can search for information online and recently each home has now got a telephone. They make their living with fishing. Catching and freezing the fish in large freezers, storing them till the boat that does the rounds around the Cook Islands, drops by to collect it all.

The people are friendly and hospitable. We were invited to lunch that first day. It was a very tasty meal of fish with onions and rice.

A boat that was recently 'lost' on the reef when it's mooring broke.

The mooring is free, but it's sort of expected of you to 'donate' various 'unwanted' items off your boat to the island. We were assured that if our hosts had no need of any of the items given to them that they would filter it down the line to the rest of the islanders. Later we learned that this is not the case if you give the stuff to Edward. Sadly he seems to be a bit of a pack rat and he hordes everything for himself, so in the end you leave the island rather disillusioned. Otherwise it's a beautiful place with lots of trees that shelter the homes from the worst of the cyclone winds that sometimes tear through there.

Beautiful tall trees.

A lovely walk.

Shady and cool.. David looks really tiny next to these trees!

A classroom at the School.

Some more classrooms and they have a good internet connection here too.

When we arrived and were chatting to the officials, we were told that there was another English girl on the island. Wow, cool, we were dying to meet her. Somehow though we didn't get to see her till we were leaving to go back to Puddytat and she came walking down the beach on her regular evening walk. We didn't have much time to say anything, I think I called out to her that we'd like to get together and chat. Next day was Sunday. We'd had a rough night as the wind had decided to pick up and the rain fell, making me get up and swap jerry jugs as they filled. One of the mooring balls was continuously knocking on the hull, so David was up and down trying different methods to quiet it, so by the time the sun rose we were still sleeping and for the first time in ages we slept till 09:15. After 11 am we called Edward and asked him to ferry Rose out to us so that we could meet her. We knew that she wanted to leave the island and were considering taking her along with us. This they duly did later that afternoon. Rose who is really Ros, (pronounced Roz ) seemed such a nice person so we told her that if she wanted she could sail with us the next day. She did want and so next morning after some tearful farewells from people who'd grown to love Ros very much, we dropped the mooring lines and sailed off toward Tonga. West. Sailing off into the sunset. :-)

Aitutaki Island, trying to get in.

We arrived at the island at about 08:00 and were very pleased that we'd managed to get there during the daylight hours. We knew that navigating up the small channel they had was not going to be easy as it was very shallow in places and not very wide. We have a beam width of 23 feet so we have to be careful about where we go. :-)

A reef all around the island.. where is the entrance?

We motored around trying to find the channel by eye. We could not see any marker buoys or posts anywhere, so we decided to follow the chart plotter.

As we neared the entrance marked on the plotter I got more and more jittery. David was standing on the bow and i was following his directions. First he told me to drive to starboard and then to port. The plotter showed no reason to be taking these deviations. I got more worried. The surf was pounding on the reef around us and sounded ominous. we could see a dark stretch of straight water ahead, indicating a long deepish channel, but just before that the water looked really shallow. It was hard to tell the depth because the water was so crystal clear. I don't know if you've ever experienced that. you can be in 40 ft of water yet the bottom looks as close as 1 or 2 feet, very disorientating. Just then I noticed that the depth sounder was not reading a bottom.. great I thought just what we need right now... I wanted to get out of there but David said to go on, and then it happened. We hit the reef. An loud awful grinding and bashing, bumping sound. I started to shake, oh Shit I thought. David yelled at me to get us out of there, I yelled back that he should come and take the wheel and I'd guide him out. He is way better at the helm than I am. So we swapped places.

It was just as well. I was showing him the direction he needed to go when he yelled that he had no steering.. Oh Shit I thought again. He worked the engines and propellers hard and managed to swing us around and out of danger. As soon as we were clear and in 30 feet of water we dropped the anchor. We needed to assess the damage and figure out what to do.

David donned his fins and snorkel and jumped into the water. He took a look at the rudders. The port one had bent it's shaft a tad and was jammed up against the hull. What to do. He came up on deck and we discussed our options. One was to disengage the rudder from the system and try and go in with only one rudder, the other was to drop it out, dinghy ashore and get it straightened there. There was another option and we thought we'd give it a go.

David went into the water with a long line that we'd draped over the bow roller where the anchor chain normally goes, he swam it back to the rudder and tied it around the blade. I attached the other end to the windlass, ( the machine we use to pull the anchor up), and then I slowly tensioned the line. I had to release it a couple of times while David did some adjusting but eventually we managed to pull the rudder straight again. What a huge and profound relief. We sat in the cockpit marveling at our narrow escape for a lot of extra work and inconvenience.

While sitting there David decided to go through the information we had for these islands. We have several cruising guides, and in one of them we found a note to say that the Chart plotted entrance for this island was false... well we knew that now ;-p ...  anyway this chap gave us some way points to follow to get into the anchorage. David plotted them and they were quite far from where the plotter had told us to go.

The marked channel and then the triangles where we actually ended up going.

We decided to take another chance. I'd calmed down now and was determined not to let this place beat me. So there I was once again at the helm with David standing at the bows directing me a little left and then a little right.... Before I knew it we were in the channel, which by the way was marked with thin maybe 10 mm black sticks that you could hardly see till you were almost upon them. I was still nervous but I didn't feel the foreboding that I'd felt before, even when the depth got down to 2.5  feet. :-)

It didn't take long and soon I was turning us around, dropping the anchor and backing Puddytat towards the shore so that David could tie our stern to a tree. This was the way that these folks liked our boats to be anchored apparently.

We sat back and relaxed, taking in our surroundings. Whew what an ordeal. It was 12:33.

Tied up and looking at our new back yard.

Our Trip from Tahiti to the Cook Islands.

Day one. 09/11/11. Wednesday Afternoon 16:00. Exhaustion! thats all we could feel. Leaving an anchorage when you're ready to drop with exhaustion is not a good idea, but we had to leave, we'd already stayed one day over the limit and this morning we'd been slowly checked out by some officials on a small boat as they drove by. They could see that we were working hard at getting Puddytat ready so I suppose that's why they let us be. Finally at 15:45 we motor sailed out of the safe harbour area at Papeete, Tahiti.

Sunrise the next morning.

As soon as we were clear of all danger and we'd eaten our meal of lasagna, I went down to our cabin and crashed. David woke me up at 21:00.. groan groan groan I was still tired. He collapsed into the bunk and I sat upstairs trying to get some enthusiasm going. Nope nothing .. sigh... I sat my whole watch, gave David and extra hour till 03:00, like a zombie. Thank heavens for radar.

During David's sleep we were hit with a rouge wave and it found the half open porthole we'd left open in our cabin. David was woken, from a dead sleep, to a torrent of water cascading all over the place. He had to go and shower to get all the salt off him. All the sheets and things were dumped on the floor and towels draped onto the bunk and he want back to sleep... It rained and gusted and we flew along even with the main dropped... oh yes we decided that with both of us being so knackered, we'd drop the mainsail and only use the genoa. That way if we were hit with one of this areas infamous 70 knotters that spring up out of nowhere, we'd be able to furl the genoa till only a tiny corner was visible and run downwind with it. But lucky us, nothing happened and I handed over the watch to a slightly refreshed David and crawled into the damp bunk. Bliss!

Day two. Thursday. I came up in the morning and soon afterwards David went down to sleep. A couple of hours later he emerged, feeling much better. The day went along with alternating wind and no wind, but nothing over 20 knots, I rinsed all the bedding and hung it out to dry... a lovely calmish day. I baked bread and started to make a courtesy flag for The Cook Islands. It's a blue flag with a Union Jack in the top left corner and 15 white stars in a circle next to that. Again after our late lunch, smoked chicken roast and veg this time, (we eat at about 16:00), I slept and later that evening David woke me from a totally dead sleep, for my watch, then he went to sleep, in a much dryer bed this time :-) I wasn't so tired tonight, thank heavens. My body was catching up and getting into this new routine. I carried on with the flag and finished it just before my watch was over.. nice ;-D  We'd had hardly any wind the whole night, we were crawling along at 3 to 5 knots... in  5 to 8 knots of wind. Nice and peaceful.

The Cook Island flag I made.

Day Three. Friday.. 11th of the 11th of 2011.. ha ha nothing was written in the log book during David's watch... hmmmm.... I do remember that it rained and squalled pretty much all day. We were either dropping the main or lifting it again and catching water.. lots of lovely rain water.. what did we eat.... oh yes Kedgeree from some left over fresh caught Wahoo that we were given by another sailor... who's name is Ding.. true! :-) Everyone calls him that.

Day four. Saturday...Wonderful winds. 17 knots once for all of 7 minutes, yeah I was out there in the rain watching the wind speed and our speed wondering if I was gonna have to do some fast work if we were hit by a biggie.... then it died down to 12 knots and we went from scooting along at 11 knots to a more sedate 8 knots. The wind stayed pretty constant all day. So it was nice and uneventful. We haven't seen the sun for two days now... It's constantly overcast with occasional huge black rain clouds that make the radar shriek out it's warning.. then we look at the clouds and decide whether to carry on or drop the main.

A large storm ahead.

The center is where we are. This is the storm above as we see it on Radar. It is about 9 miles wide.

During this storm the wind whipped up to about 35 knots, David had dropped the main and he was furling the genoa when it hit. There was a lot of rain, we collected scads of water and then it was gone. The sails were reset and we carried on.

Day Five. Sunday.. No wind... we motored last night till almost 01:00 then it came up.. 11 knots yay. better than what we'd been having. I set the sails and switched off the engine. So when I handed over the watch to David at 02:00 we were sailing. It seems though that at 04:18 the engine had to be switched back on as we were going nowhere. From then on he was switching the engine on and off dealing with gusts of wind and dead calms. The log book has this note : "Wind 10 to 3 to 10 knots. The drizzle is now set in. The water is calm - just 6 inch ripples on the 3 to 4 foot ocean swell. The unsettling part is we never KNOW what the wind is going to be. We have a radar that shows us the size of the system, we have eyes to see the wave conditions and the darkness of the clouds and wind instruments to keep track of the wind changes.... But I can't tell, yet, when we are about to get clobbered by a 30 knotter, in the back of my mind is the capsize of the Chris White Cat last year... they didn't see it coming either."
So there you have it. This weather is sure keeping us on our toes.
It's now 22:00 (10 pm). I've just had a look outside and seen stars. The moon is rising and for a change I can see it. SO lets hope that we are done with all those storms for a while.

We expect to reach our destination, Aitutaki Island, at about 07:00 tomorrow. So I'm on watch till 01:30 instead of 02:00, because I'll have to be awake just before 7 to take the boat into the pass. I always get the job of taking the boat into our new anchorages. David stands point and scans the depths for coral heads, especially in places where we are going tomorrow. It's reported to be very shallow so we're going to have to be really careful. The Island's GPS position is 18 deg 54'S and 159 deg 47'W according to the guide book. If you have "Google Earth" you can have a look at it.:-)