We did an overnight sail from northern Tonga to the Ha'apai group, which is the middle group and the least visited. These islands are all very low-lying with lots of reefs, so they were quite tricky for sailors before GPS technology made things easier. They are still tricky, because you can't completely trust the GPS since it works off of old charts (which are the only ones available for this area at the moment), but it definitely helps. We had to pick our way quite slowly at times, with Jeff doing lookout duty on the bow again, but this time we navigated through all the coral heads without mishap.
Our first stop in Ha'apai was in Pangai village. Jeff and Fred went ashore to check us in and to check out the stores. We were a little low on supplies because the supply boat to Northern Tonga was weeks late due to some technical malfunction, so there wasn't much fresh food in the stores there when we left. Things did not improve much at the stores in Pangai, although we did get some frozen chicken, but both Jeff and Fred said this town was the most depressing place we'd ever stopped at, and they wanted to get out of their ASAP. We had to stay the night to get good light for getting out of there, but we left as soon as the sun was high enough the next day.
Our next stop was at Uoleva island. This island was beautiful. We were anchored off a long sandy beach and could dingy over to some fabulous snorkeling. The coral here was the most spectacular we'd seen on the whole trip. It was very tall and there were lots of different varieties, some of which we hadn't seen anywhere else.
We spent three nights here. The first two were by design, the second was because it got very cloudy the next day and we didn't want to go anywhere in this coral infested water without very good visibility. During our stay we went to a beach bash for Tom's birthday. Tom is crewing on Anzac, and Les from Anzac really MacGyver'ed up some tables on the beach for the event. There were about 10 boats in the anchorage and everyone came and brought a side dish, and Leslie from Anzac cooked up a bunch of chicken and we all had a nice feast.
We made another stop in Ha'apai at an island whose name I just can't remember (I'm writing this from Idaho without benefit of the boat's log book which would tell me this information). This stop was also for provisioning and also not very successful, although Jeff and Fred did get an interesting tour of all the island shopping spots by one of the residents. When they told him they were looking for the store he showed them the way, and when it proved to have no vegetables and they asked him if any were available, he took them to a bunch of different fields where they were able to pick their own pineapples, mangos, hot peppers and limes. He seemed a bit surprised when they asked him how much they owed him, and they were a bit surprised that he was surprised, but although this gentleman was quite nice, the guys thought they had seen most of the island already and there was no real need to stay any longer, so we decided to head down to Southern Tonga the next day.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment