Tag Archives: Tonga

Landfall, Vava’u, Tonga

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TLDR: We are on a mooring in the southern part of Neiafu harbour, after 9.5 days and 1,330 miles of sailing. The last few hours were painful as a stationary squall just north of Vava’u caused the winds to go gusty and on the beam. We dropped all sail and with the poles and all their rigging still up we could not really clear everything in a heaving sea for a beam reach. So we motored the last 20 miles…

Not a great way to finish, but we are here, in daylight, and ready for a beer! We’ll worry about check-in tomorrow!

The wind finally backed a bit more to the east yesterday morning, and we followed it at first to ensure we could make a decisive change to the downwind sail plan. By midday we were 1.5 miles south of the direct course and the wind was still backing, so we set about striking all sail and rigging the two poles for the goosewing setup. Conditions were not great, with a 2.7m confused sea rolling the boat in all directions while we were wrestling with heavy gear on the foredeck. We initially left the main and genoa up to help steady the boat while we set the big spinnaker pole to port. With conditions increasing the risk of someone going overboard, we were in harnesses and life jackets, tethered onto the jackstays for the duration. An hour and a half later the staysail was hoisted and the #3 genoa unrolled. Peace descended as Sunny Spells scooted off towards Vava’u at 7 knots.

Conditions were pretty good, and we averaged 6.6 knots overnight, directly towards our destination.

On the equipment front, the eutectic tank in our fridge has on occasion spilled sickly fluoro green coolant into the fridge over the last few months. Yesterday we repacked everything into the freezer (nothing like a bit of redundancy on a boat) and I disassembled the cover over the eutectic plate. It appears there’s a design flaw that allows the coolant to be hydraulically pushed out the little standpipe tube that holds the temperature sensor thermocouple. While I always have the filler cap loose, the coolant has quite a high viscosity so appears to seal the threads anyway. When we are on energy saving mode, the plate cycles through a wide temperature range, and the expansion of the air above the coolant causes a pressure increase, pushing the coolant up the standpipe. I replaced the filler cap with a short nipple that will allow free flow of air into and out of the tank and added coolant to the tank to get it up to the correct level. Hopefully that is that…

But I digress…

Crossing the International Date Line

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The wind and sea state continued to be challenging all Friday, with the wind speed increasing as the day wore on. Mid-afternoon we took a third reef again and rolled half the headsail away. It was early hours of Saturday morning before the wind started abating and the sea state slowly improved. Of course, it’s always feast or famine, so we were soon motoring, with our hopes of a Sunday arrival receding.

The weather continued awkward, with regular gusts to the mid 20’s on the beam. It was also quite variable, so there’s a lot of shaking out of reefs and then re-reefing, all in an effort to maintain a decent rate of progress, as we need to maintain 6.5 knots to get there in daylight tomorrow. The sea state has been lumpy and we regularly get slapped by a breaking wave on the beam or port quarter, and it is pretty rolly. Not our favourite passage so far.

The ships clock was set forward to UTC+13 as we crossed the International Date Line (at 169.5 degrees west here) in the early hours of the morning (so instead of Saturday it is now Sunday). We are currently ahead of pretty much everyone on the planet, and a day older, which we can ill afford!

I had not appreciated just how arbitrary the date line is. Apparently, according to my mate Chat-GPT, there is no international treaty that defines the line and each country in the area has just made up its own rules, often out of convenience. The line on the map is just an interpolation of the resulting jigsaw.

Fun fact!