We reluctantly said goodbye to Niue after only six days. We would’ve liked to stay longer but we wanted to get to Tonga and get ready for K’s brother David and his wife Marian who were flying in to join us in Nieafu. But before we left, we had one more get-together of our friends from Fine Gold (Leisha and Greg) and Dreamcatcher KM (Karsten, Jarrod, Floss, and Ben). K treated them to some Jordanian soul food: homemade lamb kebabs, hummus, and khubbuz (pita bread), topped off with an offering of his fine home brew.
Early the next morning Karsten treated us to a round of his delicious cappuccinos aboard Dreamcatcher before we set sail (this cruising life’s tough at times).
After saying “Ta-ta for now” to Karsten and crew, S demonstrated an alternative technique for disembarking from a tall yacht to a short dinghy (much soggier than the usual method). K thought it looked fun so he joined her for a quick dip.
We had a good two-day passage with plenty of breeze and reasonably well-behaved seas. Just before sunset on the second afternoon, one of the control lines on our wind-vane chafed through. The line runs through the dark, cramped, nether regions under the cockpit, but we were back underway in less than an hour thanks to this dollar-store doodad (officially known aboard Khamseen as “the grabby thingy”):
We counted ourselves lucky that the line broke while it was still daylight and before the winds picked up – with gusts to 30 knots. The windy conditions provided a great opportunity to give a trial run to the reef points K installed in our staysail. We’re happy to report that the shortened sail worked great!
We were in for several surprises when we reached Tonga. First, a low gray rain cloud rolled in as the morning sky lightened so that, except for being a few degrees warmer, the islands of the Vava’u group more closely resembled the San Juans back in the Pacific Northwest than a tropical paradise. Second, we discovered we’d unknowingly crossed a dogleg in the international dateline overnight and we’d lost a whole day! And third, not all customs docks are set up with a small boat in mind.
Vava’u’s dock doubles as a container ship dock with huge rubber bumpers jutting out from it like gaping, solar-panel-eating teeth.
We had a hair-raising time trying to pry ourselves off the quay against the 20-knot wind on the starboard beam and did indeed come within millimeters of peeling off the vulnerable panel – several times – on those rubber teeth during our attempts to get away. It seemed nothing short of miraculous that we still had all our panels intact as we headed for the anchorage in front of town.
We spent several days getting to know the town of Nieafu (“nee-AH-foo”), hanging out with the Dreamcatcher folks (who arrived in Tonga shortly after we did although they left a Niue day later), and preparing Khamseen for David and Marian’s arrival.
We’d been looking forward to this reunion for many months, and it showed.
That night we were all invited to a farewell happy hour on Dreamcatcher (photo by Karsten), where Floss had made a half dozen plates of hors d’oeuvres, including wee small bite sized beef wellingtons.The following day they sailed for Fiji. We were sad to see them go but are really glad for the time we had together.
