I would never have described cruising as relaxing. There are relaxing days, even relaxing weeks, but overall the words that spring to mind when I think of my life cruising are words like exciting, overwhelming, and intense rather than words like relaxing, mellow and comforting.

So, it is with some surprise that after 5 months of traveling by plane, car and other people’s boats, I am finding living on my boat, in a dusty boat yard, in Fiji’s tropical heat to be a relief. Tension that I didn’t know was there is seeping out of me. Apparently, even for someone traveling full time, traveling without my “snail shell” is tiring.

I am home. My home is a mess and she isn’t her finest as a living space while buried in a keel pit, but still, I am home.

We had so many cool experiences, of such variation in type, over the last 5 months that I still find myself sifting through the memories and trying to fit them together into a coherent narrative.

We had our two months living in a tree house on a private island in Tonga, kiteboarding ourselves silly and playing with other people’s dogs.

We had two months vagabonding around New Zealand. During that time, we were hosted by three cruising friends. Luckness showed us the Bay of Islands. Nomad showed us Great Barrier Island and part of South Island.  Dream Time showed us Waiheke. We also were able to visit with the crews of Nyon, Bravo and Celestial.

We traveled by bus, by rental car, in our friends’ van, hitch hiking, by ferry and we slept more than half of those two months in our trusty tent which finally fell apart and was left in NZ. We rock climbed on both North and South Island and my oh my it felt so good to be back on the rock.

Then I went to see my family whom I missed dearly, two childhood friends, and ran out of time, and frankly energy, to manage to see anyone else.

So now I’m back and somehow returning to the boat makes me feel like writing again. We are taking the day off of boat projects today. We’ve had a great run of ticking projects off the list. It’s been a very productive haul out and we expect to spend another week in the pit, a week on the stands and put Estrellita back in the water by the end of the month.

FIJI – here we come!

This is the 4th video in the “A Taste of…” video series we’ve been working on as we’ve been cruising. First, the Marquesas, then the Societies, then traveling backward in time to British Columbia and now, what I think is our best so far, A Taste of Tonga. And in case you are wondering, the drone footage is from a friend, not our own (unfortunately).

Direct link to the video on youtube here

Have you ever mooned someone at night and had them confuse the sight of the starlight reflecting off your arse for the rising sun? No? Well, if so, you could be part of an island legend.

I’m not kidding. I’m laughing, but not kidding.

Imagine our surprise when we read the tourism sign at the bottom of the Mount Talau hike in the Nieafu, Vava’u, Tonga region and reached this quote:

Ahhhh….too good.

The summit had nice view point balconies and picnic tables, unfortunately strewn with trash which looked like local teens.

The views at the top were very nice but how can they beat the story? I’m still hoping that someday they will erect a statue of Tafakula’s heroic and inspired moment.

Here is Estrellita’s home for the cyclone season, and you may have noticed she isn’t floating in the crystal clear blue waters of the Marshall Islands.

No one is certain (still) whether this year will be an official El Nino year or not, but with the increased west wind anomalies and the elevated risk of typhoon activity in the Marshall’s, the fact that the Marshall’s are atolls (and our own sucky experience with wind from the wrong side in an atoll), we decided to delay heading to the RMI until next year.

We debated staying in Tonga, and were on the waiting list for the keel pits in Fiji, but by mid-October had decided that we would head to New Zealand for the first time. After planning to be in NZ at the end of 2012 we figured it was about time! We had gone so far as sending in our arrival paperwork to NZ, in a 24 hour period we were notified that we had a spot in the keel pits in Fiji if we wanted it and we had a pretty fantastic opportunity to as caretakers as a resort in Tonga.

The decision: Ultimately, we decided to make the passage to Fiji, put Estrellita in the keel pit, prep her for leaving, and fly back to Tonga for some resort time near our favorite kiting location in Vava’u. And so we did…

I’ll write more about the passage, our experience going into a keel pit, what we did to prep the boat, finish up my memories of Tonga by boat, and write about our land travel over the next few months.

The plane plan: We aren’t certain where we will head after Tonga. NZ by plane is a real possibility but we are staying open to other opportunities (anyone have any flight passes from Nadi or Auckland?) but we’ll end up back in Fiji in time to do a month or so of work on the boat and splash in Fiji at the very start of the season to start exploring a new country.

We spent just under 3 months cruising Tonga – 1 week in the Ha’apai group and the rest in Vava’u. It is a long time for a cruiser trying to make it from Mexico to NZ in one season but there is so much more we could have done if we had more time. We would have loved to go back the Ha’apai group, and to have seen Niautoputapu. Even in Vava’u, we could have spent a lot more days kiting at Kenutu before we got bored of that place (if ever).

As the months past, the network of connections we had made in the place grew. We made friends. We said goodbye to friends. We joined and left (or were left by) several fun gangs of people.

We had mixed reviews of Tonga from friends before arriving. We knew boats that had been here, been very disappointed and left immediately for Fiji. We knew boats who had been here, loved it and wished for more time. It was difficult to know what to expect because most people we heard from had only spent a month here, with at least a week in the main harbor, and had their eyes on their passage to New Zealand. Many of our friends saw some cool stuff here but they didn’t have much time to explore the nooks and crannies.

We had a fantastic time. Everyone has their own soft spots in their hearts for certain kinds of places, and Tonga didn’t capture us long term as French Polynesia did, but I can’t imagine us not having a good time here. Beautiful anchorages everywhere you go and heaps of them.

What we liked:

• KITE, KITE, KITE. Wow. Kenutu makes our top 5 list so far – totally. If you kite, and there is wind, go!
• Holy whales! If you arrive at the right time (it was mid-August for us this year), the mothers and their wee calves are in the shallow interior waters. Later in the year the whales stay in Vava’u but go to the deeper exterior waters where you are less likely to see them. We arrived at the peak of calving and it was amazing. Every time we went sailing we saw them. We saw them breaching and playing from our anchored vessel. Spectacular.
• White sand beaches.
• Amazing water colors.
• Loads of anchorages so even when it is busy you can find your own spot if you like. Generally great holding.
• Every place has a little surprise, something good and unexpected to find when you explore.

What was a minus:

• Underwater is a little underwhelming. You can find some live coral, you can find fish, except in the most sheltered bays the water is clear, but to our (admittedly jaded) experience, it is…only ok.
• Spear fishing is a bit of a no go unless you are willing to go far out and deep. No leisurely shooting in the anchorage in the coral fields.
• While there are lots of easy great anchorages, some of the places we wanted to explore were anchorages on shelves where swinging meant coming into the reef near the beach.
• Guidebooks were whacked (this isn’t really the fault of the place, but true).
• Channel 26 ;)

Thank you Tonga!

Like many boaters, I enjoy walking the docks in a new location and seeing all of the different boats, the different gear and different style owners bring to each boat. If you look through the regatta photos I posted you will see a fairly large selection of the fleet of cruising boats that we saw in Tonga this year but here are a few other vessels we snapped shots of on the water.

I don’t know the name or type of all of the boats in these photos but chime in if you do.

Being in Neiafu reminded us in many ways of being in La Paz. We had a great time in La Paz, and have a lot of great memories of good times with good friends there. Unfortunately, when we think of the town we also think of the bad apples in the ex-pat community. I don’t know if it was a fluke, or just our year, but we found that although most ex-pats living there were nice there were two annoying themes that kept repeating themselves: the cruiser-police who spread weird rumors and the angerballs. An example of the cruiser-police is the person who kept saying that if your Mexican courtesy flag was smaller than your ensign, you were insulting the Mexicans. The angerballs seem to restrict themselves to making rude and aggressive “anonymous” comments on the VHF. Both of these minorities left a bad taste in our mouths about La Paz, despite the fact that we had a great time there.

Apparently, we are capable of getting smarter ;)

Three months ago we rolled into Neiafu, which has a large ex-pat community, a regular cruiser net, and repeater stations on VHF channel 26 so both the net and cruiser hails can be heard even in the outlying anchorages. After a few hours of being on 26 and the next morning listening to one net, I realized that if we didn’t turn off that channel, we were going to have the same distaste for Neiafu. So we rolled our dial back to channel 16 and have spent the last 3 months enjoying the distance that our lack of participation puts between us and any drama. Now, we hear about the cruiser-police (e.g., trying to enforce a speed limit for dinghies of dubious legality that none of the Tongan drivers or dive boat follows) and the angerballs (e.g., the guy in the crowded mooring field who rows over and tells everyone to turn off their generators and dive compressors) as funny stories told to us by our friends over happy hour beers. Because we don’t have to hear either group directly, those stories are amusing to us, not frustrating.

We really like Neiafu which I’ll post about logbook style separately, and as you can hopefully see through our various posts, we have been having a world class time in Tonga.

Thank you Martin. Thank you Jeff & Paula.

Thank you for funding a much needed “fancy dinner” in town. I remember reading Lin and Larry Pardey’s books and how Larry would take Lin out for dinner on their first night in port as a break from cooking. We both cook on board but when we can, we still enjoy the treat. 

Compared to French Polynesia, eating out in Tonga is relatively inexpensive. It still isn’t necessarily cheap unless you search out the right local spots but it is much tastier and less expensive in general than we have been accustomed to.

On a gorgeous sunny day we picked a spot overlooking the harbor of Neiafu, Vava’u, Kingdom of Tonga, ordered a glass of house wine, an appetizer and two tasty seafood dishes and had a slow meal while watching the sun go down. Martin, Jeff & Paula – you rock!

Friends had told us this was their favorite anchorage in Vava’u and what good advice that was!

Kenutu has hiking, crashing waves (on the opposite side from the anchorage), a great beach, gorgeous water colors all around, lots of room for anchoring and good conditions for a solid night of sleep. Plus, as already discussed, it is a fantastic kite spot.

We hiked all over the island and still managed to miss a few trails that others told us about. We swam in the anchorage, organized a few beach fires, played with the crew of other boats and kiteboarded ourselves silly.

We visited three times, always when the wind was forecast to be strong, and the anchorage was perfect.