Day 5

Its Tonga time! Last night we decided to do an early hyperspace jump over the dateline and change the ships time and date to Tonga (UTC +13).

A friend tracking our progress asked: “Are you sure you are not missing out [on] a chance to visit places in the pacific you may never see again? Imagine that you sell the boat and then it would definitely never happen again.”

We’ve either been to or after researching, found all other stops on this trip to New Zealand to be undesirable:

Hawaii – harbormasters do not want yachts anchoring, marinas don’t want us or are unsafe, natives will rip you off and don’t like haoles.

Kiritmati (Christmas Island) – rolly outside anchorage

French Polynesia (excepting Gambiers) - been there and now overcrowded with anchoring restrictions in the Societies, unfriendly natives.

Rarotonga – crappy harbor with onerous clearance regs – will fly there some day.

Manihiki – rolly anchorage outside the lagoon and have all the black pearls we want.

Suwarrow – been there, park not open this season (ranger died).

Palmerston – families fight over hosting yachties, can’t use own dinghy to go ashore, bad anchoring.

American Samoa – been there, Paga Pago is a sh*t hole with a rat infested check-in wharf and we have enough inexpensively purchased provisions from Costco in Reno NV to get us to New Zealand.

Samoa – been there, nice but not worth the extra distance and stop.

Fiji – spent six months there – seen it all.

We stopped in Penryn because we had not been there, the natives are nice and it was the closest port of call leaving San Francisco (barring all the above) on our way to Tonga and New Zealand.

We will spend over two months in Tonga's Vavau Group because it on the way, closer to NZ, has dozens of sheltered anchorages, small resorts/restaurants, diving and swimming with whales.

It’s a bit like Johnny Cash in this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ov4epAJRPMw&ab_channel=MargrietAskew We may do a parody some day with all our cruising ports of call from around the world…

On June 16, 2024

1200 Tonga Time

1600 PDT (June 15)

1300 NZST (June 16)

Our position was:

16d37.0m S, 168d44.6m W

COG 248dT

Noon to noon (25 hrs):  218 nm