Minerva to Tonga

It is so good to be a sailing boat again. We haven't had to use the motors since turning them off 7am yesterday and it looks like the wind will hold for us to sail all the way into Pangai this morning.

We left Minerva Monday afternoon around 4:30pm with another rally boat, Pixie from Sydney. Pixie is a 36ft mono and obviously has different sailing characteristics to us. By dawn Tuesday morning Pixie was over the horizon behind us and no longer showing up on AIS and by mid morning was longer on the radar. From that point on we saw no evidence of any other vessels out there with us, not visually, on AIS nor on radar. We were still in VHF radio range with Pixie and had morning and evening chats on each others progress, but apart from the radio contact you feel very much on your own in a big ocean. The reality is there were probably serval vessels within 100km of us.

Tonga sits on the Pacific fault line and has active submarine volcanos. The route we are taking from Minerva to Tonga takes us pass 2 of these, one of which has been very active lately with underwater eruptions producing new islands which only last a few months then break up and disappear back below the surface. Needless the say, these new islands are not on our charts. As we are coming passed at night we are giving the area a wide berth.

As mentioned in the previous post, we are having to control our boat speed to arrive at the start of the reef system in daylight with the sun fairly high so we can see the reefs and bommies. The charts, paper and electronic, for some parts of the Pacific are inaccurate as some are still based on surveys done in the 1800's if there haven't been more recent surveys done. This being our first time to Tonga we don't know how accurate the charts are so we are being very cautious, although we have heard that NZ has conducted extensive surveys in Tonga over recent years. The best navigational aid around reef is your eyes and they need the sun to be at the right angle to be effective.

Full moon is Saturday so our moon overnight has been very full and bright which is great while on passage. Last night there was little cloud cover so the moon lit up the ocean and you could see the swell and sea state which is far more preferable to those dark lightless nights where you can't see the swell coming at you, you just feel it toss you about.

We have just come in behind the outer islands so the sea swell has dropped and we have light rain washing the salt spray off the boat. It is another 15Nm (28km) to the start of the reef system and the rain and clouds are clearing. A prefect way to finish a ocean passage, to arrive with a salt free boat.