Author: malene

 

“Grab a drink”, shouted the woman at the stall, waving what looked like tomato juice at us. We had just finished talking to the New Zealand Biosecurity officials about the requirements for getting the boat into New Zealand, and were settling in on the beach to watch a round of hobie cat races.
David grabbed a glass, taking a bite of the crunchy celery stick.
He took a sip and winced, unprepared for the hit of vodka, his tastebuds not quite ready for the onslaught of alcohol at 8 am in the morning.
“It’s not too strong”, said the woman.

It was regatta week in Musket Cove, in the Mamanuca group of Fiji. The normally calm bay was transformed from a mellow anchorage abutting a moderately empty resort into a heaving mayhem of drunken festivity for one week. Most of the yachties in Fiji were here, taking part in not-so-serious racing and very serious drinking. Each day a plethora of activities were on offer, from hobie races to hairy chest competitions, each attended by scores of bleary eyed boaties happy to have an excuse to party.

We had come to Musket Cove to go kitesurfing, on the flat water next to the sandbar edging the bay as well as on the nearby Namotu break, a world famous wave. Our participation in the regatta events was unintentional, but as it turned out that several of our boating friends with kids were there, we happily joined in for a bit of post kitesurfing fun and games.

Our old pal Andrew from Raglan joined us in Musket Cove for a day, having just delivered a superyacht from New Zealand. Tempted by the wind, Andrew managed to find one day in his busy schedule where he could grab a ferry from Nadi, so we picked him up and went to Namotu for the day on the wave.

By this stage we had perfected the boat launch, slowly feeding out the lines to send the kite out behind the anchored boat and gently manipulating them until the kite sat nicely on its side, bobbing up and down on the water surface, fastened to a carabina on a piece of line hanging off the boat, ready for one of us to jump in the water, hook in, and get going.

Next to us on the sandbar was the superyacht owned by one of the Google executives, a great monstrosity of gleaming powerboat housing tired uberrich people for their week of relaxation and kiting in the tropics.

And so the week went, kiting alternating with watching pseudo races and judging dinghy decorating competitions. The kids had a ball catching up with their boat kid friends, roaming along the beach in thick gangs, fired up on lollies and icecream from treasures found buried under the sand.
When not roaming on the shore, the kids took turns flying their new trainer kite, swooshing it around in big figures of eight, feeling the pull of the kite in the light breeze.

*Not wanting to favouritise any one family name over another, I normally combine two-name families into one. But as Kate and Duncan are Ross and Grant, respectively, I fear I might offend them if I abbreviate it to the Rants, or the Gross. Perhaps the the Kaduncs?

 

“And I ask you, what is your relationship with God? Do you believe in our Father the Lord and his son Jesus Christ?” Mary leaned forward, fixing Duncan sternly with a steely gaze lazering forth from above the narrow-rimmed glasses perched atop her nose.

“Do you believe in our Lord, do you love God as we do?” she repeated, her voice rising as her hands lifted from her lap. “Do you cherish our Lord, who gave us his son to save us from our sins?”

Duncan shifted uneasily under her steady stare, subtly changing his uncomfortable cross-legged position on the hard mat. Was he meant to answer, or was the question rhetorical?

“Because we believe that the Lord Jesus Christ died to save us from our sins. And we love the Lord. And we love his son Jesus. And we are happy that you are here today, to share our service. We are happy to worship the Lord with you, to pray and to sing with you”.

“Hallelujah, hallelujah”, exclaimed Dorothy softly in the background.

Mary’s glare widened from Duncan to encompass the whole of the darkened room. Next to her was Dorothy, a large lady in her forties, with the signature tightly cropped short Fijian hair, clad in a long, loose fitting darkly patterned dress. Dorothy’s husband, a fit looking man in his forties or early fifties was by her side and next to him, in a narrow doorway lit from behind by the bright outside sunlight, a heavy woman missing most of her teeth sat bottle feeding a baby. On the other side of the door we sat, a row of white faces, skinny bodies and wide-eyed children – Kate, Toby, Remy and Duncan, followed by myself, Matias, Lukas and David. Next to David, on the other side of another small door sat two toothless elderly villagers clad in Hawaiian shirts and sulus, their eyes closed, lips mumbling barely audible Hallelujahs.

 

We were in a small Fijian village on the island of Wayasewa. Our friends Kate and Duncan and their boys Toby and Remy had been on the boat for three days. We had anchored in the calm bay off the small village on Saturday afternoon, and upon presenting our sevusevu to the elders were promptly invited to join the church service the following day, which we’d happily accepted.

 

“So Lord we pray for forgiveness for our sins, we entreat you and beg of you to forgive us, because we love you Lord, love you.” Mary’s voice boomed, colour rising on her face, sweat pearling on her brow.

“Hallelujah”, moaned Dorothy, swaying from side to side on her place next to Mary on the mat, eyes closed. “Hallelujah, oh Lord. Hallelujah”.

It had been quite an experience to visit the village. When we arrived on Sunday morning at the appointed time, ready to go to church, the villagers were all piling into a small panga which soon looked dangerously overloaded. It turned out that the church service was being held in another village, one hour boat ride away, and they were all going there. An elderly New Zealand couple from the other yacht anchored in the bay was crammed in amongst them, looking a bit nervous.

“Are you coming as well?” asked the man anxiously.

“Not sure”, we called back. “Good luck!”

We hadn’t been invited to the other village, possibly because the boat was already too full. But we had been told to go to Dorothy’s house. As there was only one boat, and we were an additional eight people, the village elders had seemingly decided we should stay behind and that a special service should be held for us in Dorothy’s house.

Meekly following a young woman who had been sent out to fetch us we were led through the grassy village scattered with breadfruit and coconuts, past empty doorways revealing little of the dark houses behind. Dorothy’s house was large by village standards, and we were ushered into its surprisingly airy insides and invited to sit on tightly woven Pandanus mats with the elderly villagers looking on. After a brief welcome speech by Dorothy’s husband we were fed steamed buns and cups of hot tea which we sipped whilst complimenting our welcoming committee on the beautiful village, the new school and the general marvellousness of Fiji. Dorothy’s English was fantastic, and she was clapping her hands and smiling at our children, who came forth shyly to say hello and answer some questions.

 

Once tea was over, Dorothy fetched Mary, a tall, broad lady with a large face under a tight microphone cover of black hair wearing a starched cream shirt coupled with a long, dark skirt, who introduced herself briskly with a handshake designed to crush infidels.

 

“And now we will sing”. Mary leaned back, resting her bottom onto her feet, exhaling and smoothing down her skirt. The brief sermon was over, and Dorothy’s husband opened the book of hymns laying in his lap.

“We don’t have any English ones”, he said apologetically, handing us a book and pointing to the correct place.

The elderly toothless lady who had hitherto remained silent signalled the pitch with a wavering voice, counted down, and then they all joined her in a Fijian hymn. Immediately, the most incredible singing filled the room, six voices rising in perfect harmony, enveloping the small room in God, beauty and light. With tears in our eyes we joined in as best we could, hoping that the addition of our unschooled voices wouldn’t ruin the glory of the moment.

 

Later, after having been treated to several marvellous hymns we went to donate some books to the school. Sitting in the shade of a tree by the waterfront we met a group of younger women. One of them had a young baby in her arms. When we went to say hello, she asked if we had any medicine for her baby, a five month old girl with a bad dose of scabies. The baby’s feet, armpits, tummy and arms were covered in raw-looking infected sores.

“Has she had it a long time?” we asked.

“For two weeks”, answered a friend of the mother’s. “There is no doctor here, but there is a nurse on the other island. She hasn’t seen the nurse yet, she comes over once a month.”

“It looks sore”, I said.

“It’s itchy. It’s scabies”, explained the mother. “Do you have any medicine for scabies on your boat?”

We went back to the boat and rummaged around our medical resources and found a tube of antiseptic cream. Scabies are small mites that get under the skin and cause irritation and infection, and they are treated with insecticides, which we didn’t have. We didn’t want to hand out antibiotic creams as the infections were secondary and really the baby probably needed treatment for the mites, so we settled for an antiseptic nappy rash ointments which would at least soothe the skin irritation, hoping that the mother would soon get to see the nurse.

Back in the village the children came back from church and a group of girls soon joined us on the beach. At first they hung back modestly, asking us questions and practicing their excellent English, but soon they tore off their clothes and jumped in the sea, swimming and playing in the water with the boys. They were amazing children, looking after the foreign boys playing on their beach, helping our clumsy sons clamber onto rocks, showing them how to jump in, diving down and swimming under water for metres only to jump out and roar and splash to the great delight of our children.

 

Fijians are the easily the friendliest people I have ever met. Wherever we go, we are greeted by people asking where we’re from, how we like Fiji, and which is our favourite team in the upcoming Rugby World Cup. The men stoop down and ask our boys whether they play rugby, how they like the All Blacks, and if they have seen the Fijian Rugby team play. The women stop me on the street to comment on how handsome the kids are, and children everywhere wave and shout “Bula, bula”, hello hello.

 

Kate, Duncan and the kids brought with them brilliant weather and when not visiting villages we spent much time in the water – jumping off the boat, snorkelling brightly coloured coral reefs, and swimming with the obliging manta rays.

Thoroughly stoked to be back together, the four boys explored the beaches of deserted and inhabited islands alike, finding caves and sticks and turning them into homes and weapons. They played in the shallows, jumping from rocks and sliding down algae covered limestone to land in the clear blue water just beyond the sandy beaches. On the boat they created magnificent drawings of outer space and its creepy, alien inhabitants, and constructed intricate contraptions out of Lego, pausing only occasionally to ask for food and water.

In between swimming and managing children, Kate cooked up a storm, serving delicious treats round the clock to the rest of us, and we soon found ourselves sitting belching quietly in the sun, feeling utterly spoiled with the good fortune of having such amazing friends come on board and share a week with us. Thank you for coming, Kaduncs, and we’ll see you next on the beach in Raglan.

 

 

 

Matta lifted her head out of the water. “Wesawaysing” she said through her snorkel.
“I know”. I kicked my fins, floating on my back, basking in the hot afternoon sun. Although I couldn’t understand the words, I got the gist from the tone of her voice.

She spat out her snorkel, kicking to stay upright in the water. “It’s amazing!”, she said again. “It’s like a completely different underwater world”. She stuck her head down again, gazing at the corals below, at the fish teeming around her floating legs. Under her, a bright yellow butterflyfish swam back towards the reef, and she quickly stuck her snorkel back in so that she could swim off and chase it.

It was late afternoon. We had just arrived at Navadra Island in the Mamanucas, an island group west of Viti Levu in Fiji. Matta and had jumped in straight after anchoring to go for a snorkel while the others went to the beach after daring Adam to catch a goat with his bare hands to supplement our dwindling protein resources. We had caught a Spanish Mackerel a couple of days earlier but hadn’t cooked it because we weren’t completely certain it was safe to eat. They have ciguetera in Fiji, and as much as the locals said they thought it was safe, they had asked an awful lot of questions about where exactly we caught it, and how big it was, casting some doubt in our minds.

Completely at ease in the water, Matta had taken to the snorkelling the first time Adam took her in. She was amazed to be floating in an aquarium, delighted by the colourful corals, the curious fish coming up to check on her and the bright blue seastars littering the sandy bottom between the coral outcrops. Every spot we anchored in she wanted to snorkel, and now we were on our way up north to the Yasawas group of islands, to Manta Reef, to introduce her to some really big fish.

We had picked up Adam and Kristi and their children Matta and Marvin one early morning in Vuda Marina on Viti Levu. They had flown in from the States where they had spent the last six weeks visiting family. Despite the jetlag, the kids had been straight into boat life, Matta bouncing on the trampoline whilst Marvin stood singing, turning an imaginary steering wheel at the bow to drive the boat expertly for hours on end. When he fell and bumped his head, he rushed back to the bow after a quick cuddle with Kristi, sweeping the tears off his cheek as he ran, shouting “I have to go finish my song, Mom”.

 

 

In the warm afternoon on Vanua Levu, Matta and I continued to swim for a while before eventually climbing back out onto the boat. David was standing on deck, binoculars aimed at a super yacht that had entered the bay half an hour earlier.
“I think they’ve run aground”, he said. “Look, they’re trying to pull it out with their launch”.
It did look like it. Huge and shiny, the yacht was swaying wildly as the waves were throwing it this way and that on the reef. The motor launch was going as hard as it could, engines fully revved, but the yacht was not budging from atop the reef.

“That yacht is stuck”, Adam said as he, Kristi, Matias, Lukie and Marvin approached in the dinghy. “We’ve been watching it, it’s definitely run aground”.
“I know”, David said, “let’s go see if they need any help”. He climbed into the dinghy as the sandy kids scrambled out, stepping over the reef shoes and sandals scattered over the bottom of the boat.
They set off and we watched them head over. At this stage the towing rope had been attached to the mast and the launch was going full power to the side, trying to pull the yacht over just enough for the keel to get off the reef.

“It’s got to be nerve-wracking”, said Kristi.
“Yeah”, I said. “Imagine if the owner is not on board, if the crew are just hanging out in Fiji, waiting for a weather window to return the boat to New Zealand. And then they have to make that phone call”.
“Oh boy”, she said. “I think it’s getting clear, look”.
The launch had pulled the yacht over 45 degrees, the mast edging closer and closer towards the water when it suddenly lurched and righted itself, reversing full power off the reef.
Kristi and I cheered, imagining the damage below water and the bill to repair it, happy that it wasn’t us that had run aground.

 

Fiji’s 340 or so islands are surrounded by coral reefs, many lurking just below the surface of the water, ready to pounce on skippers caught unaware. There are charts for the area, but many of the reefs are uncharted and the waters are famous for wrecking ships. We can only sail during the day, when the sun is high enough in the sky for us to see reefs, and even then we have to stand on the bow, peering ahead wearing polaroid glasses to ensure that we spot any shallow water in front of the boat.

Keeping watch is not bad, though, as it helps us spot wildlife. On our travels with the Daniels we had two pods of dolphins come ride our bow waves, to the great delight of the children who were hanging over the bow, whooping as the dolphins surfaced half a metre away from their faces. One encounter was on a windless day and Adam, Matta and I jumped in the water, hoping for a play, but the dolphins kept their distance and eventually dived down, out of reach.

We had better luck with the manta rays, who appear regularly at the aptly named Manta Reef Pass. The enormous rays come at high tide to filter feed in the current of the pass, and on our first morning there, we turned up alongside hundreds of tourists from the two nearby resorts. The water was a bit manic, full of snorkellers with selfie sticks, 20 or so people per manta ray, manically thrashing after the graceful giants as they turned and dove to escape the crowds. But the kids loved it and Matta was incredibly excited to swim just above such huge creatures.

 

We went again on the afternoon high tide and had them all to ourselves, four massive rays gliding around us in the fading light, one of them at least 4 m across, its mouth a gaping hole leading into a seemingly hollow interior. The following morning the Daniels and David went again, Matta squealing with delight as the huge creatures turned and twisted all around her.

Later that day we pulled anchor to head back to Nadi to drop off the Daniels, and on our way out of the bay a lone manta ray feeding in the other pass raised one fin to wave us goodbye.
“Bye bye”, shouted Marvin, “bye bye manta ray”.

A day later he was waving goodbye to us after a week on the boat. It had been a great week, full of the delightful company of good friends for us and the kids alike, incredible sunshine, beautiful snorkelling, great kitesurfing, exciting marine life and one good fish caught just in time for a last fish supper. Bye bye Marvin, we’ll see you in New Zealand when we get back!

It’s the middle of the night. All is dark, only the channel marker lighting the way through the treacherous reef blinks faintly, beaming out its warning of the dangers below the surface. Bob is bopping up and down gently, small wavelets pushing her from side to side. On the nearby shore two yellow lights illuminate the breakwater protecting the shoreline against the sea, casting an eerie light over the ancient rocks.

It’s 2 am and I’m wide awake, ready to start my night watch. I’m craving a cup of tea and a midnight snack involving copious amounts of Nutella. My body is ready for hours and hours of reading, interrupted every ten or so minutes for me to put down my book and stare into the darkness to check for reefs, vessels and other hazards. I am awake.

The only problem is that I ought to be asleep. We’ve arrived, Bob is perfectly safe, and I no longer need to be on watch. We’re firmly anchored onto a featureless sandy bottom off the township of Levuka on Ovalau Island in Fiji, and I no longer need to stay awake all night to keep us clear of hazards.

David and the kids are asleep, but I’m too jetlagged to nod off. Our latest passage watch schedule has David on watch from 7 pm to 2 am after which I take over until he wakes in the morning, usually around 9 am. We’ve just come from Tonga and it worked well; after a day we settled well into the new rhythm. The passage only took three days, but this is obviously enough for me to have fully realised my nocturnal self. So here I am, alert at 2 am.

The passage was rather uneventful apart from the port engine starter motor braking down, presumably on purpose, just to keep us on our toes. It happened on the second night, on David’s watch. Later on in the night I switched on the starboard engine to charge the batteries, and after half an hour that overheated, leaving us with no working engines. This wasn’t the first time the starboard engine had overheated – it had happened regularly since the oil cooling unit had broken back in the Tuamotus. After reasoning that it probably wasn’t strictly necessary to cool the oil, David boldly bypassed the oil cooler, only for us to discover that thereafter the engine had become rather prone to overheating. As a result we had limped along for months with a starboard motor that we couldn’t run for more than 20 minutes or so before it cut out due to overheating. Finally, in Tonga, we got the unit repaired and David reinstalled it, giving us two fully functioning engines. For about two weeks, anyway, up until this passage where suddenly none of them were working.

The following morning when David got up we assessed the situation. The port engine refused to start, so we had to give up on that. Hoping that the starboard motor had just been low on coolant we filled it up again and spend much of the last day willing it to work for long enough to allow us to navigate safely into the bay and anchor upon arrival the following day. The anchor windlass is powered off the starboard motor and so anchoring without it would be very difficult.

The following day we entered the Lomaiviti group of islands east of Viti Levu, and headed straight to Levuka town on the island of Ovalau. Just before the narrow pass leading into Levuka Port we switched on the starboard engine and crossed our fingers. Thankfully the engine fired up beautifully, and held its cool allowing us time to anchor safely. Phew.

And then, there we were, in Levuka – the oldest European settlement in Fiji, the capital of the first Fijian government, the wild west frontier town which used to have a terrible reputation as a seedy lawless cesspit, for decades the home of the terrible ‘blackbirding’ practices that forever changed the population of the western Pacific.

Fiji is a fascinating place. Called Viti by its original inhabitants, this vast group of more than 300 islands has been settled since the first Lapita people arrived from Vanuatu around 1500 BC. The firstcomers were followed by successive waves of Micronesian, Melanesian and Polynesian peoples who all took up residence on the fertile volcanic islands surrounded by fringing reefs teeming with fish. Archaeologists estimate that agriculture became commonplace in around 500 BC, after which the population increased and resource wars began. So bad was Fiji’s reputation as a home for fierce warriors with cannibalistic tendencies (one man alone, named Udreudre, was reported to have eaten at least 872 people) that Europeans gave the place a wide berth for centuries until a small group of whalers finally settled in Levuka in the 1830s.

The Europeans named the area Fiji, the Tongan name for the islands, the Tongans having had intermittent control of large parts of Fiji for centuries. Access to European weapons exacerbated the already fierce tribal feuding until the bloody wars finally came to an end when Ratu Seru Cakobau from Bau declared himself the winner. Missionaries entered Fiji from Tonga, and Cakobau converted to Christianity when the his allies in Tonga threatened to remove their forces which had been supporting him.

In the 1860s, following some misfortune and few misunderstandings, Cakobau became heavily indebted to some of the large trading companies that had set up in Levuka, and overwhelmed by his debts he ended up offering Britain the control of Fiji in return for paying off his debts. And so it was, that for about $45,000 worth of debts, Fiji became a British Crown Colony in 1874, and Levuka was pronounced the capital.

Set on a narrow fringe of foreshore backed by steep green hills, Levuka is an eerie place. Back in the 1840s and ’50s, when it was a drunken frontier town, the waterfront strip covered in bars and kava joints. It continued to grow, and in the 1870s the town was heaving, sporting 52 hotels and home to about 3000 Europeans. When Fiji became a British colony in 1874, Levuka became the capital and remained so until 1882 when it was moved to Suva because there wasn’t room for expansion in Levuka.

Levuka was also the Pacific centre of ‘blackbirding’, the large-scale movement of cheap labour from Pacific islands to Fiji, Samoa, Australia, Peru and New Caledonia. Sometimes the islanders entered the blackbirding ships of their own volition, eager to make a better life somewhere else, but often they were tricked by sailors dressed as priests or threatened at gunpoint, driven like cattle into the hulls of big sailing ships, off to spend their lives doing hard physical labour in far-flung destinations. This trade in humans devastated areas of the Pacific, leaving whole villages empty. One island in Tonga lost 40% of its population to Peruvian slave ships, and the country Tokelau lost nearly half its population to blackbirding. Huge amounts of Indians were imported as cheap labour into Fiji, to work on the sugar plantations, and to this day more than 35% of the population of Fiji are of Indian descent.

Levuka still sports some of the old buildings from its past days of seed and glory; the whole back end of town is a World Heritage site. Old churches stand next to Royal Hotels, shop facades advertise trading companies, and fine wooden buildings along the back street are interspersed with neatly mowed grassy parks, tennis courts and flagpoles, along with signs threatening legal action against anyone littering.

The historic serenity is somewhat disturbed by the town’s power plant on the water front, which sits screaming out a deafening roar 24 hours a day, creating a permanent town-wide tinnitus. Another sensory attack is provided by the tuna canning factory, cunningly located upwind of town as if to ensure that the strong fishmeal stench emanating from it will cause the maximum possible disturbance. The smell is palpable, almost physical; a mixture of aquarium fish flakes and ground up cat pellets lingering heavily in the midday heat, hovering just around nose height above the warm pavement on the main street.

After two days at anchor the noise and smell are getting to us and we decide to leave as soon as David has effected an ingenious repair to the port starter motor involving copious amounts of expoxy and duct tape. Miraculously it works, but he warns that it probably won’t last, and orders a spare part or two for us to pick up when we reach Nadi. In the market I stock up on fresh fruit and vegetables and also buy bundles of dried kava root, the obligatory gift we have to present in the customary sevusevu ceremony which we will be required to partake in whenever we anchor near any villages in Fiji. The tradition of sevusevu requires visitors to present kava to the chief of the village they’re visiting; a present in exchange for the hospitality of the hosts.

After Levuka we went to the island of Makogai. From 1911 to 1969 Makogai was a leper colony, home to thousands of leprosy patients sent here from all over the Pacific to be cared for by kind nuns. Separate villages were built on the island for different nationalities, and an old map on the wall shows the location of the European village, the Fijian village, the Indians, the Samoans and the Vanuatuans as well as a village for ‘others’. The register records that a total of 4185 patients landed on the island, of whom 1241 died.

Nowadays the island is a marine reserve and home to a giant clam hatchery. Mr Navindar, the kind manager of the hatchery facilities took us on a tour of the ruins of the leper colony, showing us the open air movie theatre and the prison used to detain patients who had engaged in disorderly conduct. More than a thousand people are buried on the hill behind the current day hatchery, many of the graves unmarked, and Navindar spoke of visitors coming to the island to retrace their ancestors who passed away from the terrible disease.

Blissfully unaware of the tragedies that once unfolded onshore are the giant clams in the bay. Imported broodstock from Australia, these gigantic molluscs lie gaping on the seabed, some up to a metre long, casually siphoning water through their glistening mantles. When we dive down to touch them they flinch but greedily remain open, not wanting to forego feeding opportunities just because of minor disturbances. These are the parents of the babies in the hatchery and are larger than any clams we’ve ever seen before. Being an excellent source of defenseless protein, the giant clam was nearly fished out in Fiji, and the hatchery was established to restock reefs around the country. Hatchery workers dive to inspect the giants in the bay regularly, peeking in at the gonads through the incoming siphon. If the gonad looks ripe, they lift the entire clam out of the water (apparently it takes four strong men to carry a large specimen), install it in a hatchery tank and inject it with serotonin, which causes the animal to spawn. Giant clams are hermaphrodites, releasing the eggs first and then a while later the sperm, and after business is completed the giant animal is taken back into the bay, placed gently on the sand, and given a respite for at least a couple of months.

 

Inside the tanks the eggs are fertilised and after a week or so the babies settle out from the water column after which they slowly grow until they are big enough to transfer into the wild. Giant clams are filter-feeders but most of their energy come from the photosynthesis carried out by the tiny symbiotic algae that reside in their mantle tissue. The hatchery target production was 30,000 juveniles a year, most of which will be placed on reefs around Fiji and hopefully grow into gentle giants.

After Makogai, we went to Namenalala Island which is in the centre of the marine reserve surrounding the famous Namena reef. The island is home to a booby colony and as we came close birds were everywhere, swooping down upon us, following the boat as we sailed in. They were gorgeous, wide-winged and inquisitive, hovering in the sky, spreading their tail feathers as they slowed down directly above us to have a good look.

On shore the trees were full of boobies – suspicious mothers guarding small closed eyes chicks in nests, and large, clumsy, fluffy, white chicks perched atop fragile branches. The water in the bay was clear and full of corals adorned with colourful jewel-like Christmas tree worms extending their fans boldly to suck nutrition from the water. Reef sharks and rays swam in between coral boulders and schools of brightly coloured fish flittered about.

 

Three other boats with children were anchored in the bay and the children soon took turns jumping on our trampoline.

After two nights in Namena we set off to work our way towards Nadi, where we were meeting our next visitors, our dear friends the Daniels.

On the way we went to idyllic Naigani Island where we anchored in a turquoise lagoon just off a deserted white sandy beach fringed with coconut palms. Next we visited Nananu-i-ra, a small island north of Viti Levu where we had a kitesurfing holiday three years ago. We came into the island on a calm afternoon, the reflections of the houses adorning the waterfront lengthening into the glassy waters. Hot from a windless motor we rushed ashore and revisited the site where the kids had their first snorkelling experience three years ago, off the pier where swarms of fish lurked waiting to be fed by eager holiday guests. The children soon found some other boat kids to play with and spent the afternoon playing in the water.

 

The following morning we set out early, intending to get to Vuda Marina in Nadi before nightfall. The Daniels were arriving two days later, and we had to provision and get the proper engine parts to replace David’s impromptu epoxy job before the engine malfunctioned again. Both engines had been working well during our recent Fiji explorations, but we were reluctant to rely on the epoxy repair for too long, especially given we would have guests on board most of the time for the next month and therefore would have to be in certain places at certain times to meet people.

The forecast was for a gentle 5-7 knots of wind but as we motor sailed around the north western corner of Viti Levu, the wind strengthened steadily until we were driving full throttle into a 30 knot headwind. We spent the next three hours tacking every fifteen minutes in the narrow channel between the island and its fringing reef, making very little headway. As nightfall approached we had to concede defeat and head for the nearest anchorable spot, hoping that we could spot any reefs on the approach in the rapidly fading light. The bay was large and muddy, fringed with mangroves with the occasional reef sticking out, and we managed to anchor safely just as the sun set.

In the morning we pulled anchor early and headed back out into the headwind, reaching Vuda just before lunch. Finally we were here, ready to provision, excited to have our very good friends join us for a week of adventures the day after.

“Mummy, I’m all SPAM”, announced Lukie, hovering in the doorway, feet dripping with water. “So I can come inside.”

“You’re what?” I asked handing him a towel, my mind half on the stove. The rice was boiling over and I needed to check on the pan – was that a burnt smell?

“I’m spick and SPAM”, he said. “So can I come inside, Mummy?”

Right. Obviously our latest culinary escapades had had an effect. We’d been trying to use up our SPAM store here in Tonga, and the kids were loving it. Yummy salty, greasy meat, identically revolting to the adult palate whether labelled Roast Turkey, Lean Chicken or just plain ol’ unspecified SPAM. Having consumed his share of our reserves, Lukie now clearly identified fully with the brand – perhaps we should try and market him for commercials? “I used to hate food on the boat / my Dad always catching fish or clam / till one day finally my mum served a load / of lovely, salty, greasy SPAM”, cue catchy SPAM tune starting as the camera zooms to Lukie, fork in hand, eagerly tearing into a tin of SPAM, huge grin on his face.

We were in the Ha’apai island group of Tonga, a stunning set of white sand islands elegantly scattered over a deep blue sea thick with whales. Tonga sports an impressive 171 islands spread over 700,000 km² of ocean, and the Ha’apai group is in the middle of the kingdom, north of the capital island of Tongatapu and south of the Vava’u group. A rather empty place (45 of the group’s 62 islands are uninhabited), Ha’apai is home to only about 10,000 Tongans and a few resorts, making it much less busy than Vava’u where there were at least a hundred other  yachts and numerous additional tourists.

After some initial engine problems, our last week in Vava’u had been lovely, sharing beautiful sunny days with fellow cruising families. We had meant to go to the Ha’apai group sooner, but the winds were too strong for the crossing, and so we stayed in Vava’u, kitesurfing off deserted islands and expensive resorts alike, zooming over turquoise waters, the only sound around us the huffing and puffing of whales coming up for breath. Each day the group of cruising kids would jump from boat to boat, paddling to the beach by themselves in kayaks and dinghies, snorkelling and splashing in the shallow waters off white beaches before wading ashore to collect shells and crabs, building fortresses of dead coral slabs to keep them in. We’d done day trips with other yachts to idyllic snorkelling and kitesurfing locations and spent our evenings sharing meals on crowded boats or toasting marshmallows over bonfires on the beach.

But the Ha’apais lured us away, with their promise of deserted golden beaches and plenty of wind; a kitesurfing paradise. Our first port of call was the main town of Pangai, on Lifuka island. Home to about 6000 people, Pangai was at the eye of Cyclone Ian when it hit here last year, and the testimony of cyclone damage still dominates the town. Ruins are everywhere, corrugated iron roofs twisted into awkward shapes protruding atop leaning posts barely holding together the frames of destroyed houses, unfinished building sites strewn with goats and pigs rummaging through the persistent rubble.

Only the churches looked unaffected by the cyclone; clearly their restoration was prioritised over, say, the Ministry of Justice building, a dilapidated wooden house which remained bent out of shape a whole year after the angry winds. And there were many fine churches in this small town. Tonga is the only Pacific nation which was never colonised, but after some initial mishaps with missionaries getting eaten by hungry locals, the nation took to Christianity with gusto. Tonga’s legislation was drafted in 1875 by Shirley Baker, a Wesleyan Minister held in high regard by King George Tupou I, and today it is still an offence to do anything on a Sunday, with people being prosecuted for fishing, working or even just visiting a beach. Modest dress is required by law to prevent any frivolity: men must wear a shirt and knee length shorts and women skirts covering their knees and tops obscuring their shoulders and cleavage, tourists included. The churches retain their dominance in everyday life and not always to the benefit of the people, relying as they do on less-than-voluntary donations that their members (40% of Tongans live below the poverty line) can unfortunately often ill afford.

Christianity is still relatively new here, though. Tonga is thought to have been first inhabited more than 3000 years ago by the Lapita people as part of their eastward push across the Pacific. According to pre-Christian myth, the islands were fished out of the sea by the God Tangaloa, although other traditions ascribe the fishing luck to the trickster God Maui. Directly descended from the Gods and related by kinship, three kings used to rule the main island groups of Tongatapu, Ha’apai and Vava’u, and bloody wars were fought by all with neighbouring nations. Tongans excelled at warfare, and at one point Samoa, Tokelau, Niue and Fiji were all under the rule of the Tongan kings, with sporadic raiding parties reaching as far away as the Solomon Islands.

The Dutch were the first Europeans to sight the islands but as the locals quickly became well known for their fierce warfare and tendency to consume the conquered enemy, no Europeans lingered in Tonga for long. Captain Cook stopped here in 1777 and narrowly avoided getting eaten in the Ha’apai group when local chiefs invited his ship and crew to a feast at an island full of supplies. Grateful for the hospitality of the friendly locals, Cook and his crew partook in the celebrations unaware that the party was a ruse for the locals to board his ship and feast on the crew. Because of a last-minute disagreement amongst the chiefs the plan was never carried out, and Cook and his men survived to innocently name the Ha’apais the ‘Friendly Islands’.

The Ha’apais witnessed further calamity when the mutiny on the HMS Bounty took place just off the volcanic island of Tofua in 1789, with the mutineers setting Captain William Bligh and 18 crew adrift in an open longboat. Hoping to get some supplies, Bligh landed on Tofua where he and his men were attacked by hungry locals who managed to kill one of the crew before the remaining refugees promptly fled. They drifted on in their longboat for months until they landed at Timor in modern day Indonesia.

More successful, from a Tongan perspective, was the attack on the British privateer vessel the Port-au-Prince in 1806, where locals finally succeeded with the same old trick of inviting the captain and crew for a feast and then proceeding to raid the ship. Only the life of the 16-year old William Mariner was spared (the Tongans believing him to be the son of the Captain), and when he was eventually allowed to return to England four years later he bore glorious tales of contemporary Tongan culture which fortunately were recorded for posterity back in England by Dr John Martin, an amateur anthropologist.

Fortunately, the Tongans are less hungry nowadays. It seems that corned beef has replaced more macabre dishes and the national fare is now corned beef stewed in coconut milk served with starchy root vegetables steamed to a mush. We had heard that canned meat is considered an outstanding delicacy preferred over all other foodstuffs and brought several tins along to trade for fresh fish, fruit and vegetables, but after learning of Tonga’s health problems we kept the cans firmly in our stores and resolved to keep our SPAM problem to ourselves. Officially the heaviest nation on earth, a whopping 84.1% of Tonga’s population is estimated to be obese and close to 100% is considered overweight. Not that they’re all unhealthy; one of Tonga’s main exports is successful rugby players, and prior to becoming officially the heaviest monarch on earth, the old king Tafau’ahau Tupou IV won the national pole vaulting championship in 1932. I wonder how hard the competition was given his royal status and the size (by which I mean number, not weight) of the population – is pole vaulting big in Tonga? How heavy was he back then? I keep imagining a giant of a man perched atop a thin, wobbly pole which is bending, quivering and only just avoiding snapping under his bulk as he gracefully leaps off the ground.

 

Tonga was first unified in 1875 by King George Tupou I who managed to resist the flirtations of the English who were eagerly eyeing up the Tongan islands, keen for some influence in the region. However, after his death his son George Tupou II signed a ‘Treaty of Friendship’ with Britain in 1900, making Tonga a British Protectorate. From this point onwards Britain took over the management of Tongan affairs and full sovereignty was only re-established in 1970 by the heavyweight pole-vaulter king Tafau’ahau Tupou IV.

Today Tonga is officially a democracy, but old habits die hard and Tongan society is still highly stratified with status determined by birth. Contemporary Tonga has three classes of people: royalty, nobles and the masses; people of unspeakable low value. Nobles still hold most positions of power. The Tongan word for commoners, me’a vale, literally means ‘the ignorant ones’, and when approaching the king, these vermin have to use a special language and crawl on their hands and knees, which can’t be an easy task given the nation’s obesity problem. Tafau’ahau Tupou IV resisted calls for democracy vehemently, and although he died in 2006 little has changed since: his successor apparently spent 40% of the country’s aid budget on his coronation. Judging by the opulence of the coronation we witnessed recently in Nuku’alofa, little has changed with the newest king. All government ministers are still appointed for life and up until recently few were elected by the public; most were chosen by the king from the noble families. Media are censured and journalists questioning of the status quo occasionally end up in prison.

The Tongans we met were lovely and friendly, surprisingly un-obese (just big boned, really), and unassuming and warm. Wearing their beanies and thick woollen jumpers to ward off the winter cold, they greeted us enthusiastically in English, or, if from further away, threw their head backwards and arched their eyebrows in the universal Polynesian wordless acknowledgement of another’s presence. Most men wore the traditional wraparound skirt tupenu on top of which many sported a (to us) wonderfully exotic woven waistmat made from pandanus leaves, the Ta’ovala.

Mind you, we’ve probably met as many Tongans in New Zealand as we have here in Tonga, although none wearing the traditional waist mats. Presently, about 101,000 people live in Tonga, and it is estimated that as many again live overseas, mainly in New Zealand, Australia and the US. The biggest income by far for the country are money sent home from Tongans living abroad, but tourism provide some revenue as well, as does a thriving export of pumpkins to Japan.

Every corner shop or supermarket seems owned by Chinese, who sit quietly surfing the web on their iPhone in between adding up profits from the sale of expensive tins of corned beef and cheap plastic titbits using large calculators which loudly proclaim the numbers punched into them in Chinese. Subject to much racism, the Chinese are treated with universal disdain by the Tongans, and we heard many quiet complaints about the current King’s friendly relationships with the Chinese, who allegedly donated many cars and funds for the recent coronation. The sale of land to foreigners is prohibited in Tonga, but non-Tongans are allowed to rent land for 50 to 100 years and westerners own all tourist resorts and associated businesses such as whale watching operations.

 

On our visit, we got the sense that the lower caste Tongans in Tonga don’t have much to do other than eat corned beef and drink kava, and that not many hold any hope for a glorious future despite the sporadic attempts of the various monarchs to lift the country out of poverty. Like elsewhere in Polynesia, substance abuse is a big problem, and I don’t only mean the corned beef – although I’m sure it adds to the stress: imagine how horrible it must be to weigh 200 kg, be of ill health, and struggling to pay for the upkeep of your corned beef habit in addition to the fees for attending church to save your soul. Perhaps it is these stresses that lead to the narcotic kava, the tuber of the plant Piper methysticum, being consumed in huge quantities by most males. Alcoholism is also common and unfortunately linked with high levels of domestic abuse.

Not that we saw much of the dark side of this Pacific paradise, staying as we did in winds strong enough to dispel any whiff of unpleasantness, kitesurfing off beautiful palm-fringed islands, whales splashing enthusiastically in the background. On Uoleva Island, just south of Lifuka, we visited a kitesurfing resort owned by Karen and Glen, an Australian-British couple who spotted the perfectly aligned sand spit on Google Earth a couple of years ago and promptly put into motion plans to come out here and develop a small resort for wind-hungry Kiwis and Australians. Their spot was excellent and we had some great days there, the kids playing with the resident kite dog, building huts and climbing trees while David and I took turns being blown all over the shallow reef against the backdrop of breaching whales.

Tonga is a Pacific Paradise, stunning, awesome and incredible, bursting with whales and fish and idyllic little islands surrounded by picturesque coral. It is an amazing place precariously close to the edge of the rising seas. We have had an incredible time here and are sad to leave these alluring islands with their large, staunch people, incredible history and the whale-saturated waters, the like of which we’ll probably never see again. Much could be done here to better the lives of the population, and if I were His Excellence the King of Tonga I would sure make a few changes. But we’re just visitors, and will have to stick to doing our bit, like buying local produce, picking rubbish off the beaches and finishing our SPAM all by ourselves, to the delight of our ever hungry children.

Sunday:

“Hi, there. I’m trying to locate a bag that got lost on a flight from Auckland to Tongatapu”. Joe sighed, pressing the phone to her ear as she motioned the kids to be quiet. “We are in Vava’u, and we were informed that it has arrived in Tongatapu, so we are waiting for confirmation that it has arrived here”. She walked to the front of the boat, trying to escape the loud squeals of the children so that she could hear the excuses of the indifferent Real Tonga airline official clearly.

Unperturbed by our shushing, the kids continued their game, an involved Army Game in which everybody was excitedly shooting everybody else and collapsing only to jump up again immediately and shoot some more.

Joe and Glenn, and their two children Neve and Lachie, had joined the boat in Neiafu, the main town in the northern island group of Vava’u in Tonga, the day after the McDermers left. Their bag had gone missing on the Air New Zealand flight from Auckland to Tongatapu, the capital of Tonga. Real Tonga, the Tongan airline, had promised to forward it onto Vava’u, where they had already been waiting in vain for it for two days before joining us on the boat.

The bag contained all their watersports gear – lifejackets, snorkelling kits, wetsuits and kitesurfing harness. We had some stuff they could borrow, but the water was cold, and for first time snorkellers it would be nice to have well fitting wetsuits and the masks that had been bought especially for the occasion.

“They say it will arrive here tomorrow morning”. Joe came back to the cockpit, an upbeat tone in her voice. “So if we come back in to Neiafu tomorrow, we can go to the airport and get it as soon as the flight lands.”

Great! We could spend the day in a nice anchorage out of town where we could take the kids to the beach before heading back to Neiafu to pick up the bag.

Monday:

“Hello there, I’m trying to locate a bag that was lost on a flight to Tongatapu. It was meant to be sent on to Vava’u today, but it never arrived. We are on a sailing yacht, and are leaving today. It’s a serious inconvenience to us not to have the bag, and I’d like to get the delivery prioritised”. Joe pressed her fingers to her forehead as she leant forward, back to the wind, struggling to hear the person at the other end. “No, but we’re on a boat, and we’re leaving”.  She shook her head and bent further forward.

We had come back to Neiafu to pick up the bag, only to discover that it hadn’t, in fact, been on the flight as promised, and Joe was now trying to determine whether it was likely to arrive soon, in which case we could wait for it, or whether we should just leave. We wanted to go to the easternmost islands in the Vava’u group, where few people go and whales abound, and needed a couple of days to get there comfortably. We were hoping to meet a bit of wind and have some kitesurfing and it would be good to have the watersports bag with Joe’s harness so that she could get a kitesurf.

Nothing wrong with Neiafu, it’s a nice place. But when you only have a week to explore Tonga by sea, you want to see some deserted islands, not be stuck in the main harbour near the airport.

The kids ran past Joe, yelling furiously. A new game was in full swing, in which Neve was an evil dragon who roared viciously, showing her gleaming fangs and waving her claws menacingly in the air, terrifying the small animals swarming around her.

The boys had quickly settled into a routine of high volume shouting-jumping-swinging-shooting games. Neve joined in occasionally, but she preferred being in the water, where she had just discovered snorkelling. We had a spare kid’s snorkelling set which fitted her perfectly, and she was whooping with delight as she discovered the underwater joys of Tonga.

“OK, thanks, I appreciate it. Bye now”. Joe put the phone down, narrowly avoiding being stepped on by the kids rushing past behind her as she bent forward in her seat. She turned to face us. “Apparently, it’ll definitely arrive tomorrow morning”, she said, looking relieved.

Tuesday:

“I know. But your office said that the bag would definitely be in Vava’u this morning, and it wasn’t”. Glenn was pacing the deck, phone clutched to his ear. “And now I would like to speak to your manager to discuss how we can arrange for us to get our bag, or have it returned to New Zealand”. He shuddered in the chilly breeze and sat down on the seat at the bow, a dark shape against the grey midday sky.

We were anchored just off the island of Vaka’eitu, a scenic spot near a beautiful beach. It was still possible for us to zip up to the other side of Vava’u and take a taxi to go pick up the bag in case it arrived.

 

Matias, Lukie and Lachie stormed past Glenn to jump furiously on the trampoline, shouting loudly. Matias grabbed hold of one of the genoa sheets and started swinging over the tramp, and Lukie grabbed the other to swing the opposite way. Within seconds they collided in the air.

“Aww, awawawauauwuwuawu”, Lukie wailed, collapsing onto the tramp with one hand on the hurt shoulder. He rolled over, clutching his arm. “Mummy, Matias hurt me, and it was on purpose”, he yelled before collapsing, sobbing loudly. “Awauawauwwaaauwuwaw”.

I ran out on deck, shushing him as Glenn shielded his ear and quickly moved indoors, head down, ear pressed to the phone.

Wednesday:

“Right. But I’d like you to take a photo of the bag and send it to me, so that I can confirm it is our bag, before you forward it to the hotel”. Jo sighed and sat down, shading her eyes against the brilliant sunshine. “OK, thanks. I’ll give you the address once I’ve confirmed it’s our bag”. She hung up and turned to look at us. “They say they’ve got the bag in Vava’u now, but I want to know that it is ours for sure. I’m going to ask them to drop it at the hotel we stayed in before, then we can maybe pick it up from there”, she said.

I lifted my head from my card game with Neve and Lachie. “That sounds great. Then you can come kiting tomorrow”, I said.

“You forgot to say Uno”, shouted Neve. “You’re fined!”

“Uh oh”. Lachie winced and picked up two more cards.

I returned my attention to the card game, hoping to keep the troops calm and happy for another half hour before the jumping mayhem started again.

Friday:  

“The bag is here, apparently, but they can’t deliver it to the hotel”, said Joe, putting down her phone. She rubbed her eyes and put her head in her hands. “It may be best if we just go and collect it, otherwise we’ll never get it”, she sighed. “We’re flying out early on Monday morning, and the office will be closed on Sunday, so this is probably our only chance”.

“That’s OK”, said David. “We’ll just head back to Vava’u Island, and then you can jump off and get a taxi to town, collect it, taxi back and we’ll pick you back up”

He was interrupted by Matias. “Lachie, let’s go and play Army”, he yelled, pushing past David and trampling over Neve as he sprang out of the cockpit. Lachie jumped up from his seat with an excited squeal, streaming after him.

Lukie stomped after them “I don’t want to be shot, I don’t want to have weapons”, he roared, a troubled tremble already resonating in his voice. “I don’t want to die”.

Glenn looked at me. “I give them five minutes before someone gets hurt”, he said.

Sunday:

“Cheers”, I said. “To catching up”.

Everyone raised their glasses and we toasted our lukewarm rum T-punches, the only tolerable drink when you have no ice. It was our last night, the kids were in bed, and we were having a last celebration of our busy time together.

It had been a good week, despite the missing bag. Joe had been kiting using David’s harness, and Neve had happily snorkelled using our gear. We’d successfully sailed to the easternmost part of the Vava’u island group, an area thick with whales, their huffs and puffs breaking the silence, sprays of water misting the air as they surfaced, breathing just next to the boat. We’d caught and eaten every variety of mollusc available – squid, conch and some weird seaslug that we found in the reef shallows. We’d been to deserted islands, swum in turquoise waters and snorkelled beautiful coral. The kids had even found underwater treasure in dark caves, and Matias and Neve were proud to have mastered the tricky underwater access to the famous Mariner’s cave.

The boys’ play had settled into a routine of ever-rotating high volume games: High Pitched Loud Shooting Army, Extreme Roaring Dragon Chasing Small Squealing Creatures, Top-of-the-Voice Yelling Rope Swinging and Insanely Screaming Midgets Pushing Loudly Protesting Matias into the Hole. Every so often, normally just before feeding time, Lukie would add his wailing to the already intolerable background noise, complaining about some imagined slight, and the grown-ups would have to take turns feverishly reading or playing cards in an attempt to quiet the troops until blood sugar levels had risen enough for play to proceed.

We’d finally retrieved the bag on the Friday, and Joe had proudly presented us with the boutique beers, salami and feta cheese that it contained, delicacies brought along from New Zealand which we promptly feasted on. The wetsuits had been used at least once, and Lachie had christened his new mask and snorkel.

It had been exhilarating and exhausting for the children, a great catch up with old friends, an intense week full of the noise and mayhem that four children packed together in a small space create. We were grateful to have shared a snapshot of life with our old friends and for the opportunity to reacquaint ourselves with their wonderful children. So long, O’ssickers!

 

After a couple more cold days of passage we finally arrived at the island of Tongatapu in the Kingdom of Tonga on 1^st of July. Actually, we arrived on 30^th June, but given that we lost a day on the passage due to Tonga’s recent hop over the international date line, it became the 1^st of July.

After mooring up at the Nuku’alofa ferry terminal as instructed by Port Security, we spent the first day waiting for hours for Customs, Quarantine and Biosecurity officials to come on board. In the end a friendly taxi driver eager to move things along so he could give us a ride into town called up the Customs officials, telling them that we were in a hurry because Ed had to catch a flight. Thus prompted, they appeared within half an hour, one official after the other, each presenting numerous forms for us to fill in and sneakily stealing our pens.

“You are lucky to be here now”, said the Quarantine official, deftly placing one of our pens behind his ear. “Everybody is getting ready for the King’s coronation. You will see lights all along the shore from here to downtown”. He patted his round belly, shook our hands, and stepped back onto the dock.

“It is a good time to come”, said the Customs man, pushing his polaroid sunglasses up on his forehead and offering a brief smile as he stuck one of our pens in his shirt pocket. “We are doing much celebration for the coronation of the King. You will see dancing and parades in town every day”. He stuck his feet back into his brand new boots, pulled the boat closer to the dock and jumped off.

“You will stay here for a night”, said the Biosecurity lady, placing one of our pens in her handbag and snapping it shut. “You will go into town and see the school children dancing”. She smiled broadly and waved her hand as she stepped off the boat.

We rewarded the taxi driver who facilitated our entry with the ride into the Office of Immigration in town. At the office we queued for an hour before finally getting seen and presented with a stack of forms to fill in. We asked if we could borrow a pen, but they didn’t have any, so Ed ran to the supermarket to buy some more which we clutched to our chests whilst on their premises.

 

The town was decorated to the nines, the white and red Tongan flag flying from every corner, rich silky red and white ribbons smothering fences and bushes, photos of the portly king and his family, benignly smiling, staring down at us from tall building facades. Everywhere school children were walking, dressed in their starched uniforms and excitedly waving flags.

 

The following day we moved to an anchorage some distance from town to await the arrival of our friends Kate and Andy and their children Grace and Dougal, who were coming to stay with us for a week. Whilst waiting we happened upon Rob and Rachel Hamill and their three children, friends of friends freshly arrived from New Zealand, who were anchored right next to us. Their youngest son, Ivan, is eight, and the boys were soon busy playing.

The next day it was raining solidly, and we huddled up inside for most of the day, Ivan and his older brother Declan coming over for a play until the ferry brought the McDermer family over late in the afternoon. After a brief night of catching up, we set off early the following morning towards Vava’u, the northernmost island group in Tonga, where we hoped to find some sun.  Unfortunately, the weather gods were unkind and we ended up with a truly horrible sail, the boat sailing into a head wind, bouncing and slamming into rough seas. To ease the journey, we decided to stop in the Ha’apai group on the way, cutting the journey from 150 to 70 nautical miles, but even this distance ended up taking us a full 24 hours.

 

“I can make breakfast”, said Kate as we took off from the anchorage early in the morning. “How about I make some French toast for everyone?”

“It’s going to be rough”, I said. “Let’s just make some toast, we’ll have a head wind and we might all get a little seasick”.

“I never get seasick”, she said, entering the galley. She started cutting bread and put the kettle on, humming a tune.

We rounded the corner and entered the open sea. Bob was rolling and jumping, heading into a confused sea. Ten minutes later Kate appeared in the cockpit, looking a bit pale. She sat down, keeping her eyes firmly on the horizon.

“I don’t think I can go back inside”, she said.

Andy tried ducking in to fetch some sunglasses, and reappeared quickly, deciding that outdoors was much easier to handle.

Grace had an even worse time of it. Within half an hour she was listlessly hanging over the side railing throwing up her breakfast, Andy holding her back from the heaving seas, pulling her hair away from her sweaty forehead. Never one to complain, moments later she lay down quietly in the cockpit, deadly white face, eyes closed, vomit all over her jacket.

 

We distributed seasickness tablets, and Grace immediately vomited again, her yoghurt spill mixing in with Dougal’s cracker-strewn vomit, the blend slowly dripping down through the holes in the floor into the sea. Uncertain about whether she actually digested the pill or not we dared not give her another, and so there was no respite for poor Grace for the next 23 hours as the boat rolled and jerked its way north.

“Daddy, this isn’t what you showed me in the pictures”, she whispered, leaning back to lie on Andy’s lap with her eyes closed. Dougal on the other side quietly whimpered that he would like to go home to Raglan now.

 

 

The only upside on the trip was some fantastic fishing, landing us both a bonito and a yellowfin tuna, a bonus for Andy who is a keen fisherman. Around lunchtime the following day we finally arrived at the anchorage, a small deserted island at the northern end of the Ha’apai group. Grace perked up once the boat was still, and we all enjoyed snorkelling, kayaking and deserted islanding for a day before attempting once more to head to Vava’u.

A great improvement on the first trip, the second voyage was a calm beam reach in flat seas, but poor Grace was still violently ill, lying shaking in the cockpit the entire day, wrapped in a large blanket, unable to move apart from periodically getting up to vomit. Fortunately everybody else were feeling good, excited about yet more successful fishing (a skipjack tuna) and the sighting of several humpback whales, promising for our whale watching plans for Vava’u.

And finally, just as the sun was setting, four days after their arrival in Tonga we arrived in Neiafu, the check in port in Vava’u. Grace breathed a sigh of relief on spotting the picturesque little limestone islands dotted through flat calm waters in Vava’u, and flashed her first smile since arriving on the boat. We had three days to explore Vava’u before they had to fly back to Tongatapu where Kate’s extended family awaited them.

So the following morning we checked in, and then upped and left, in search of some snorkelling, beaches and whales.

The snorkelling was exciting, a wide-eyed Dougal holding onto Andy’s hand as they explored undersea caves filled with balls of baitfish, the grown-ups exploring the famous Mariner’s Cave that you can only access by diving through a tunnel in the rock face. The kids played on the beach for most of a day, finding coconuts and lizards, and the last day of their visit we went whale watching with a local tour operator.

 

Tonga is famous for its humpback whales, which arrive in droves from Antarctica to mate and breed in the warm tropical seas around the island group in the months of July to September. Whale watching is a big part of the tourism in the Ha’apai and Vava’u island groups, where operators offer ‘swim with the whales’ experiences, and we were hoping to get a chance to see the gentle giants underwater whilst in the area.

We’d seen whales a couple of times since arriving in Tonga but not close up – regulations stipulate that private boats are not allowed within 300 m of whales, with fines rising up to $10,000 if local authorities find you closer. Ostensibly the rules are there to protect the whales, but I’m sure there’s an element of protecting the local businesses too, which is fair enough. There are a lot of yachts in Vava’u, and I’m sure that the numerous daily tour boats full of tourists eager to swim with whales offer quite enough disturbance without everybody else jumping in too. Any regulations around the operations are welcome in my opinion.

So we chartered a whale tour with Dolphin Dive, with the lovely guide Aurelia and skipper Villi. After a bit of searching, we soon found whales, and we jumped in several times with a couple of young males. After they disappeared, we saw a large group of whales some distance off, and went to investigate. As we got closer we were treated to the most amazing surface display, with huge males jumping gaily, fin slapping and fully breaching, crashing down with enormous splashes that sent white water high in the air. They didn’t seem to mind the presence of the boat, seemed to barely notice us, engrossed as they were in their jumping frolic. Aurelia told us they were in the middle of a ‘heat run’, where lots of males follow a female, competing for her favour. Feverishly, we rushed to get our wetsuits on so that we could enter the water to swim with them.

 

“Get in, now, hurry up” shouted Aurelia. She quickly shoved her snorkel into her mouth and slid from the back step of the boat into the water. “Come in”. Immediately she started to swim towards the whales.

The group of humpbacks were just off the boat when she got in, but they moved quickly and unpredictably. We scrambled in, swimming as fast as we could. We scanned the water, but saw just endless blue which we powered through quickly, out of breath, trying to keep up with Aurelia. She stopped, trying to kick herself up on the surface to see where they were. Head in the water we heard only our own fast breathing and the beating of our hearts, but as soon as we lifted our heads from the water we heard the loud splashing of breaching and the hiss of heavy breaths. We kept swimming furiously until we suddenly saw shapes appearing in the deep blue – we were surrounded by giant creatures. Huge and heavy, encrusted with barnacles, they eyed us curiously with beady eyes, gently gliding through the water, turning with a slow flick of a giant tail. From the depths emerged another group and we found ourselves hovering just ten metres above five or six whales, rolling and frolicking around. A huge male, a good 14 m long, swam up to another, almost touching his deeply grooved, white underside to the others dark grey back, then turned towards the depths and disappeared. Another one decided to surface for a breath, almost hitting Kate who was floating, too stunned to move, right where it came up to lift its large, knobbly head all out of the water, perhaps to check her out.

 

Their moves looked slow and deliberate for their size, but for us tiny creatures next to them they seemed to move very fast. After a while they decided to move, and with one small flick of the tail each one of the huge, 35 ton animals sped off, disappearing. All at once it was over, they were gone, continuing their furious pursuit of the female.

“Woohooo”, shouted Aurelia from the surface, fists pumping. We all cheered and she raised her hand to wave to Villi, who was leaning over the steering wheel grinning broadly as the boat made its way towards us.

Later, back on the boat, Aurelia told us we’d been very lucky.

“Amazing. The first heat run of the season, the first large groups of whales in the season, the first great breaching of the season”. Just as excited as us, she explained that they don’t normally meet large groups of whales until much later on in the year, and that they only very rarely get to be in the water with them, the whales normally choosing to move as the boat comes up.

What a week we’ve had with the McDermers. Rain and sunshine, sailing and anchorages, rough seas and flat waters. Freshly caught fish for dinner every night, deserted island with beaches for the kids to play on. Dark caves for snorkelling in, and huge whales to swim with. Thank you so much for coming, guys, it was wonderful to share all this with you!

“Daddy, I really want to go back to New Zealand”, says Lukie, sidling up to David in the cockpit.

In the kitchen, my heart lurch. Is he secretly hating the boat life, and hasn’t summoned up the courage to tell us until now? Is he missing his old buddies from kindergarten, or mourning the fact that he would know several Maori proverbs by now had he been at home? Is he aching to play soccer or do karate, and resentful that all the sports we offer have water as a main ingredient? Come to think of it, what are we doing to the poor kid, keeping him on a small boat, crossing vast oceans, exploring deserted islands – it’s what I would have wanted to do when I was a child, but do kids even want those kind of adventures nowadays?

“Well, that’s where we’re headed to, eventually”, David offers levelly, putting Lukie on his lap. “Why do you want to go back to New Zealand?”

“Because there’s pizza there. And lasagne”, Lukie beams. “I really want pizza. And meat lasagne”.

Phew. Not old friends, team sports or proper schooling then. Just Lukie’s singlemindedly overwhelming focus on food. We can fix this, or ignore it, offer him a boat substitute like, ahem, tinned corned beef or maybe even baked beans if he is lucky and we have any left.

I turn back to preparing dinner –mahi mahi  caught yesterday, served with rice and a salad, if a mixture of cucumber and cabbage can qualify as a salad. Considering my options for making the salad even vaguely edible, I decide to put an Asian twist on it with a few chopped peanuts and a sweet and sour white vinegar dressing. One thing you learn on a boat is to love cabbage, it being the only vegetable that remains edible after about a week of doubtful refrigeration. I should email my mum for some recipes I think idly – the Danes love cabbage and I have yet to have a meal there in recent years without some sort of brassica thrown in.

Lukie comes inside. “Mummy, what are we having for dinner?” he asks, leaning heavily over the seat that abuts the kitchen, sticking his hands over the dishes drying in the rack to try to steal a peanut out of the packet in my hand. On the boat he has taken to supervising the cooking when he is hungry, eagerly eyeing up all ingredients, listing all the things he’d like us to put into today’s dish.

“We’re having fish. The mahi mahi that we caught yesterday”, I say. “With rice, and a salad”.

His face crumples. “Oh, mummy, it’s not fair!” he whines. “Why do we have to have mahi all the time? And rice, you know I don’t really like mahi anymore, I prefer tuna. And I don’t really like rice”. He glares at me, and when I shrug stomps out to the cockpit where I hear him complaining loudly to David.

Poor Lukie. My children seem to be starting puberty at around the age of five. For Matias the main frustration used to be school; for Lukie it is obviously food. It’s not fair. Imagine having to dine on fresh gamefish every day.

Just as well that he is fed up with rice, though, because we are running out – we have been trying to empty the larder for a good clean-up, and the rice stores from Panama are getting lower. Soon we’ll only have brown rice left, and then he’ll really have something to complain about – rice that actually tastes of something, eughh! Imagine the horror.

I absentmindedly swat a cockroach that gamely creeps over the fridge top as I resume my dinner planning. It’s unusual to see them during the daytime: are we getting more? Resolutely pushing aside the thought of the Cockroach Problem, I check the clock. It’s 5 o’clock, I should get on with it. Cooking takes a long, long time on a boat, and even if you only have to make rice and a salad it pays to start early. Just turning on the gas is infuriatingly difficult. The stove has three burners, one big and two small, placed just close enough together to ensure that you can’t really use more than two at a time. For some reason the big burner won’t light easily, requiring you to hold down the gas button for anything up to ten minutes before it will keep going on its own. I’ve resorted to using the smaller burner, which means that it now takes about 40 minutes to boil the kettle. But that won’t do for rice, and so I turn to the big burner with a determined glare, shake my shoulders loose and relax my jaw, ready to think nice thoughts for the next ten minutes while trying to light it. The annoying thing is that it changes randomly – sometimes you have to hold down the gas button for only two seconds, sometimes for much longer, leaving you wondering whether you are wasting your time with extra button-pushing whenever you spend more than 2 seconds. Would it stay on if I release the button now? Should I let go? Part of the crazy unpredictability of boat life, not ever knowing what kind of switch-on-the-stove experience it is going to be. Don’t say we don’t have any fun here in the galley.

Experimentally, I let go of the button, and immediately the burner switches off. Seems we are in for a long one, this time. Swearing under my breath I close the window in case that has any bearing on my success and light it again.

At least the oven is easy to light. Other than that, it is a pretty useless appliance, though, sporting a top temperature of about 120 to 150 degrees C, with the added interesting physics-defying characteristic of having more heat on the bottom than on the top. Normally, hot air rises, but I suspect that the break in the seal on the oven door causes high heat losses, with whatever managing to brown on the bottom doing so simply because they are physically licked by the gas flames. There is one spot, in the front left corner of the baking tray, where everything burns on the bottom in about 10 minutes. Experience has taught me to leave that spot free, a blackened corner of the otherwise metallic baking tray.

Regardless of the cause, both pizza and lasagne came out disastrously bad, to Lukie’s great discontent. We can just about make scones and bread, that is if you don’t mind your rolls burnt on the bottom and squidgy raw on top. Not that I have any ingredients left for that either – they don’t seem to be selling baking powder in French supermarkets and as we’ve spent the last three months in French Polynesia and have none left from Panama, I have had to resort to using baking soda and vinegar for scones instead. Which resulted in completely yellow scones with a strong aftertaste of rotten egg, the terrible byproducts of incomplete acidification of the baking soda. They were so bad that both kids refused to eat them (“Mummy, I don’t really like scones anymore”), and Ed, David and I only just managed to swallow a few bites before we had to throw them overboard. Where fish flocked eagerly only to turn away in disgust once they’d had a bite, letting the remainder sink slowly to the bottom. Obviously fish aren’t great fans of baking soda either.

After that I spent my night watch making a yeast dough in the dark, peering out over the dark wavy seas through the galley windows to keep up my watch whilst congratulating myself on my multi-tasking talents. Just after sunrise, as I was shaping out the rolls to bake in the tender yellow light, I discovered that bugs were dotting the dough like poppy seeds – black little beetles looking disconcertingly like baby cockroaches interspersed with pale yellow elongate maggots writhing busily around. Great. After hurling the dough overboard, I emptied one flour packet after another into a baking dish, and discovered them all to be alive with creepy crawlies. So I threw our 15 kg of flour ecosystem and associated lifeforms into the ocean and wiped the larder clean of any contaminated flour dust. The bugs get in on the packaging, and when we can, we buy flower in paper bags lined with plastic, as they seem on the whole to be bug free. But the Carrefour in Tahiti only carried the standard paper bags, so we loaded up on that.

5:15 pm. “Is it going to work?” I mumble, hesitatingly letting go of the gas knob, and am rewarded by a smooth ring of flames, boldly holding their own. Result! I can proceed to chopping the salad. I open the fridge, fastening the heavy fridge lid on the hook suspended above the window to hold it upright whilst I rummage in the depths for the cucumber and cabbage, shutting the top again quickly to minimise cold loss once I’m done. I place the cutting board, cucumber and cabbage on the closed fridge top, ready to chop. The cucumber is suspiciously slimy, and I wonder if I can save it – given how hard they are to get, it is heart-breaking to have to throw vegetables away.

“Mummy, can I please have some cold water?” It’s Matias, standing at the kitchen counter, holding out his empty cup.

“Not now, please”, I sighed. “Let me just chop up these veggies first”.

To avoid heat loss, boat fridges open up vertically, the theory being that this keeps the cold air gathering in the bottom of the fridge, far from the escape opportunity reserved for warmer air up top. In our galley, the fridge top doubles as the bench top. Which makes perfect sense until you actually try to cook in a kitchen where you can’t access the fridge whilst doing any prepping, or having anything on the bench top.

The fridge top is too heavy for the kids to be able to open themselves, and as the tap water could be anything from lukewarm to bath temperature, the only really potable water is kept in a jug in the fridge.

“But mummy, I’m thirsty, I’m dying of thirst”, he cries, looking parched.

“OK, OK”, I snap, grabbing the cutting board and the sharp knife and placing them carefully on the narrow divider backing the sink between the kitchen and the saloon. The knife balances precariously close to Matias’s face and I hesitate, think better of it, and grab them back only to place them at an incline on top of the dirty coffee cups in the sink. As if aware that there is an opportunity to create some mess in the kitchen, the boat immediately lurches, causing the cucumber to roll off the board into the coffee pot, scattering coffee grinds everywhere.

“It’s OK, I can wash it off”, I mumble through gritted teeth, before opening the fridge, balancing the heavy lid on my shoulders whilst I grab the water jug. As usual, the jug is overfilled, making it impossible to lift without spilling water all over the bottom of the fridge.

“David”, I cry shrilly. “Stop overfilling the jug, it ends up all over the fridge”.

David comes in to stand in the door of the cockpit, lifts one eyebrow and shrugs, watching me edging my shoulder out from under the fridge top which falls heavily down, slamming loudly.

“It’s because of the filter”, he says, “it just takes too long, and I always forget it”. He’s installed a new water filter which makes the cold water tap excruciatingly slow, which means that we often leave the jug or the kettle under the open tap for the half hour it takes for it to fill. Only by the time it is half full we’ve often forgotten that the tap is on, leaving it until someone notices that it is running over.

“I know”, I mumble apologetically as I start to fill Matias’s cup.

“Here you go”, I said, handing him the cup. “Hold on with two hands, it’s bouncy”.

Washing the coffee grind off the slimy cucumber I decide to defer the cleaning of spilled water to some point in the future when I have more time. It takes a while to clean it up properly, anyway.  You see, boat fridges, or at least the unsophisticated boat fridge that we have, have the cooling system on the inside of the fridge, a unit that drips unrelentingly as water condenses. Which means that the fridge is constantly full of water. There is a drain, but it is conveniently situated at the higher end of the sloping bottom, as if to ensure that there is always a slimy one centimetre layer of bacteria-ridden liquid slushing around the undrainable parts of the cool box. All items in the fridge thus have to be kept off the bottom in tubberware lest they get into contact with this water which acts to turn any firm, fresh vegetable into a dark mouldy mush within hours.

I finish chopping the cucumber and take the cabbage out of the bag. 5:30, time to check the rice. At least we’re not having pasta – bringing the vast quantities of water to boil that a dinner portion of pasta requires takes a good 40 to 50 minutes, more when the gas is running low. The rice is still hard to the bite, so I leave it on for a bit longer whilst I go on chopping the cabbage.

Lukie comes in again from the cockpit, bearing his mug. “Mummy, can I please have some cold water from the jug?” he asks, just as I finish chopping up the cabbage.

I triumphantly shove the chopped cabbage into the salad bowl. “Of course you can”, I smile, placing the salad bowl on top of the rice pot and open the fridge again. Hearing the fridge open again, Matias comes back in.

“Can I please have some more”, he asks. “What are we having for dinner, Mummy?”

With a sigh I open the fridge again. “Fish and rice. With a peanut sauce for the fish”. I turn to look at him, holding out my hand for his cup.

“But Mummy, you know, I don’t really like peanuts anymore”, he wails.

I turn my back, count to ten and resolve to make spaghetti with sausages tomorrow.