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2C Update #142
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Back Home in Vava’u (May 23-July 9,
2006)
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Masthead
View to the East from Tapan
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Coming back to the boat in Tonga was more like coming
home than any “return” since we left to go cruising. To
start, there was returning to living aboard Tackless II,
which no matter how slick the RV is, it can’t yet
compete. Then there is the comfort of our mooring off
the Ark Gallery at Tapana (Anchorage #11). Here we can
snorkel-swim every day (“we” being I), the boat sits
steady in almost any wind, we have undemanding neighbors
in Larry and Sheri – who occasionally invite us over for
home-brew at sunset, interesting people come and go from
the anchorage, and when we need to go to town, we can
usually get a free ride in the Ark’s Tuk-Tuk, a
three-wheeled nine-seater open-air vehicle that drives
like a motorcycle! Life doesn’t get much easier than
life at Tapana!
If our first night back aboard was a little Spartan,
things got better quickly. Almost first thing the next
morning, Larry and Sheri brought us out three pails of
rainwater which allowed us to promptly graduate from the
pissy little half cup of instant coffee we’d started the
day with to a full-blow drip pot of the fresh ground
beans we’d brought back with us. Ahhh. |
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After that we got our first good look at the boat, and
the news was good. Other than being still being packed
to the overhead with all the stuff we’d stowed below
before departure in November, she was in far, far better
condition than when we returned to her a year ago in
Raiatea. We owe that to Larry and Sheri’s dedicated
attentions, every day of which was documented in a
little school booklet on the nav station. It seems they
were able to open the boat up probably eighty percent of
the time, a figure that amazed us given how rainy we
imagined the cyclone season to be. In contrast, in
Raiatea I think she got opened four times! When a little
mold started appearing on the overhead, Sheri arranged
for Kato, daughter of Noa, the Tongan who works with
Larry in his charter business, to come out and clean.
When Larry learned that only one of our bilge pumps
wasn’t operational, he and Noa changed out the bilge
hose! And when during that endeavor they found a little
diesel in the bilge, Noa undertook to clean that all out
and track down the leak! Even the bottom was clean
thanks to the deal we set up with Peter and Sandi of
Otama Song, who’d kept after it while we were gone in
exchange for use of our dive compressor.
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The Ark Gallery's
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Plus I think the old girl was just happier all round
sitting in the water than being up on the hard! Of
course, she’s a lucky girl. It was a very light cyclone
season, by all reports, with only one small storm coming
close enough to pump up the wind to fifty knots or so.
We spent the first three weeks getting Tackless
II put back together again. Even at the
leisurely pace we went, that was half the time
we spent on her in Raiatea. There was a little
suspense in getting our ground tackle recovered
from where we’d added it to the Ark’s mooring
grid, but even the 60lb CQR which we’d left set
in about 110’ of water (and over which Don had
fretted much of the time we were away) came up
like spaghetti on a slurp thanks to the new
batteries. Oh, that was a bit of excitement,
buying a new engine start battery and a new
windlass battery from Sonny’s Automotive in town
and carrying it to Tapana in the Tuk-tuk and
thence to the boat by dinghy. This should give
you an idea of how uneventful our lives were.
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Then we spent a week in town. Then we came back to
Tapana. What else can we say? The weather came and went.
We read a lot of books. I wrote a lot. I swam a lot. Don
tinkered. We helped a few boats with Sailmail problems,
and we socialized with a steady parade of old friends,
including, ironically Denis of Bobulona, the boat we’d
expected to see more of in Fiji, (who changed his plans
to take his boat back to Hawaii and diverted to Vava’u
store her with Larry and Sheri!)
Before we knew it June was slipping by fast! Although we
had no complaints about our laid-back lifestyle, I think
we were a little embarrassed just to be sitting on our
butts like this. So we started laying plans to sail down
to Tonga’s Ha’apai Island Group, which was one of the
reasons we stayed in Tonga the second season. We studied
the guidebook, went over charts with Sandy of Impetuous
(veteran of 14 years of charter here),
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Sandy
and Terri, crew of charter yacht
Impetuous
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we carted home more and more stores until our lockers
began to recover some of their former glory (Vava’u is
not the dream place to be reprovisioning!) until almost
before we knew the weekend of our departure loomed.
Just before we bestirred ourselves to take off, we did
have one big event on the social calendar…July 4th,
which was not, as you might jump to conclude, a day we
celebrated American’s Independence, but a day all of
Tonga celebrated the King’s birthday. The big event in
Neiafu was a food fair set up in the parking lot behind
the “new” “marina” (a facility built for Vava’u by the
European Community, but not to a scale useful for
cruising boats). This event married booths from all
Neiafu’s eateries with traditional dance and music
performances resulting in a most festive afternoon.
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Don w/ new video-camera film our
departure from Vava’u
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Everybody who was anybody was there, and we all ate
sample plates from pretty near every vendor! Afterwards
there was a fundraising auction at the Mermaid (Neiafu’s
primary yachtie hangout) to raise money to send an
adorable three-year-old girl and her mother to Honolulu
to take advantage of free surgery being offered to
correct the child’s club foot. Much beer was drunk and
many dollars donated. I swear the next day, the whole
town had a hangover.
In this mood, we cleared out of Vava’u and made ready to
sail south to the Ha’apai.
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