We left Tonga with many fond memories of seclueded white sand beaches, pig roast's, coconut milk and snorkeling down into underwater caves. Aswell as witnessing the American Obama victory celebrations of the whole bar of people jumping into the water. Plus the nighttime visit to a megayacht by 2 crazy crew in a dysfuntional dinghy that would only turn circles in the pouring rain... but that's another story!
So we set out from Vav'au ,Tonga due south for the Bay of Islands, NZ some 1200 miles away. The bunch of banana's that I'd picked up for free in the Cook's had finally gotten quite ripe and so everyone was excited when I finally made some banana bread! Eli especially since he would come up from the galley with about half a loaf in his hand! Cooking at sea is no easy task so whenever this rare ocurrance did happen and everyone got something the person who cooked was immediately the best guy on the boat! Eli became know as the "goat" since he would eat anything, anytime and as much as possible which was fitting as he was a Capricorn (the goat)!
We had stocked up on about a dozen pineapples ( 50 cents each) and a lot of mangos and cabbage. Plus rice and tuna, but everyone was excited that with our new lures we just had to catch a fish. We were getting about a bite per day so we felt something had to happen sometime! For once we had 2 lines out, I was holding one, when suddenly Eli, who was taking a leaking off the back of the boat yelled, "hey there's fish jumping over our lines". Our intial reaction was yeah right this is just another bad joke! But suddenly the line began to go tight and we had 2 mahi mahi on the lines at the same time. At this point of great excitement we made the mistake of letting Dave know what was going on. Dave had been kept on a strict diet of rice and beans with an occasional bit of small bacon bits thrown into the pasta to get him out of his vege-depressions at sea! Needless to say once he heard there was not one but 2 potential fish steak dinners that could feed us for 4 days on the lines he went a little manic! The first mahi mahi to come in close to the boat was a difficult propect to bring onto the boat since we had no hook to hook it in the gills and hoist on board. Eli was given the difficult task of grabbing it with his hand's (a 30lb 5ft fish) whilst holding onto the ladder off the back of the boat! As he grabbed it, it jumped and pulled out the hook and dove back into the sea, much to the anger of the Cap'n who turned his attention to me since I was still reeling in the 2nd Mahi! He barked out order's of "Reel it in faster" "harder" and then just as the fish was in close "let go of the line" and I dropped the line in the sea without thinking to a classic shout of "Noooooooooo" from Dave. Thankfully Eli had already pinned the Mahi against the boat and pulled it one board. Whilst Dave immediately got down to the galley to prepare the rice and take orders on how everyone liked their mahi, I sheepishly reeled in the line and the other's filleted the mahi. Fresh mahi was excellent, especially to ravenous sea dogs, and we watched as the rest of the mahi's followed our boat for a while since apparently they mate for life.
It was an exciting interlude in the clamest seas we'd had for the whole passage. The sea looked like a mirror and we heard another boat talking about burning insence to figure out the winds direction. They actually ended up pulling another boat into Minerva reef which was the nearest shelter since they had no gas left to motor! Minerva reef was an interesting anomaly, a reef 20 kms across gave a weather window for other boat's heading south. Stuck 600 kms south of Tonga it was a beautiful blue lagoon like water with a sandy bottom and the best coral we'd seen. Snorkeling around we saw about 5 sharks in 30 minutes! Very cool spot.
The wind picked up again and we set off behind the main pack of 12 other yachts who set off a bit before us. We were sailing along at a good speed of about 6-7 kts in the wrong direction but were anticipating a wind shift so we hoped! The wind did come around and gradually increased and we were left out of touch of any weather forecast except another nearby yacht which relayed it's forecast onto us. Suddenly we had bad news there were 25ft seas and 60 kt winds headed our way. We were partly dismayed and excited at the same time, Eli and I began reading all the heavy weather sailing books aboard and questioning the Cap'n about setting up harnesses and maybe how to save some if they fell overboard. The weather seemed to be coming from behind us so we put up all the sail and even tryed to motor sail a bit to keep up speed and get beyond the storm. This worked well, the waves had increased to 8-12 feet but the wind stayed low and we surfed the waves up to 9 knots which feels fast on a yacht! (it's about 10 miles an hour) haha. We were only 100 miles off the NZ coast and had just been visited by a pod of dolphins which surfed by our bow when the wind began to pick up that evening.
One more night of sailing to go and it was the worst! The waves had picked up to 15-20ft and the wind had began to howl, rain poured down and salty spray would lash across the cockpit giving anyone steering a mouthful. I had courageously tryed to cheer everyone up by making a gourmet meal in the galley of hot instant mashed potatoes and baked beaned with tinned turkey! I later discovered big cluster of bruises on my upper thigh from being bashed about in that tiny galley...
It was going to be a long long long night... the cap'n ordered us on double shifts and so I was up first to cheer up ol Dave who promptly fell into me as another great wave rocked the boat. Then a double whammy of 2 waves about 20ft each hit across the boat sending Dave back into the dodger and all the kitchen went to pieces, smashing cups and leaving a huge mess. I went down and found Eli angrily picking up the mess and putting it in the sink. At the back of the boat we had water swilling out of the lazarette into dave's room and the whole boat looked like a tornado had ripped through. After that Eli and I stayed up with Dave who was not used to watching at night was quite slow in holding onto something. He eventually lay down on the side of the cockpit for a bit and tryed to rest while Eli and I checked on the course and hoped the autopilot didn't go out since there was no way we could steer in this. Our next problem was to slow the boat down since it was still flying on the wave surge with only a quater of the jib up, we reefed it till about an eighth was left which helped. Meanwhile our piece of junk wind generator which had sat useless on the back of the boat broken began to make a awful howl as it spun madly in the wind. We started think it might actually come crashing into the cockpit since that was the way it was spinning! Suddenly the noise stopped, shining a light up, it had gone and we laughed with relief that the noise and danger had disappeared! We tryed to keep up spirit's by singing "Riders on the Storm", as the sea kicked the boat around, thankfully the 60 kt winds and 20ft seas were behind us so we were still able to hold our own fairly well.
The rain was freezing and so I went back below decks to dry a little, Marina was feeling sea sick and I made cups of tea for the other's above. I tried to sleep a bit but the waves kept jerking me out of bed. Suddenly a huge wave hit and about 2 feet of water crashed into the cockpit. I heard the water gush into the kitchen as the hatch was still open, more mess!
We finally got into NZ, the wind had died and we were in thick fog, Dave said "land of the great white cloud, great". I sang a bit of jimmy cliff "I can see clearly now" as the sun came out and began to burn everything off to cheer him up. In the distance the rugged islands of the Bay stuck out in the distance and we finally got out of the reach of the 12ft seas and into the shelter of the Bay to step ashore, kiss the dock and happily let the customs officials inspect our dirty boat, throw out our stinking cabbage in the fridge and the big bag of kidney beans that everyone was sick of! NZ was warm and inviting and 1 dollar hot showers were available for the first time in 2 weeks! whoohooooo
