Sat, 24 Nov 2001
(More computer problems prevent me from sending what I wrote about our visit to Tonga. As soon as I can get the entire file to save on to a floppy disk, I'll send it along.)
In Nuku Alofa, all the cruisers were talking about when would be the best weather window to head for New Zealand. We cruisers, turned amateur meteorologists, traded weather faxes and weather grams from various sources ad nauseam. The typical passage to New Zealand is about a 10-day trip and stormy weather is reported to pass through the area about every 6 days. Seafaring legend has it that on the way to New Zealand you'll likely get pummeled by bad weather once, the trick is to make sure that it doesn't happen twice. Another old sea tale is that in late October and early November, weather is stormy (since it is still early spring in New Zealand), but that later it is less so, although November is the official start of Hurricane season and a hurricane is far more serious than a mere storm.
Weighing these options, we decided we wanted to celebrate Thanksgiving in New Zealand and avoid paying visa renewal fees in Tonga, and so we planned our departure for an acceptable weather window. We had the opportunity to stop about 200 miles into the trip at Minerva Reef, a shallow spot enclosed inside a fringing reef in the middle of the ocean, but at that point in the trip we had ideal sailing conditions and had heard that the best bet was to push on through or stop in Minerva Reef for a week. We decided to press on, since we wanted to just get on with it. Most people stopped at Minerva, so we were not traveling with any other boats south of Minerva. Yet hundreds of yachts were making this passage during this time period.
For most of the rest of our trip, we seemed to have either lots of wind from dead ahead or little to no wind at all. We were forced to beat with 25 knots into tremendous head seas, water gushing over the decks and trying to find any possible route inside. The spray flew over the top of the dodger at regular intervals. Sleeping under these conditions was difficult and cooking was a big challenge. Several times we hove to, so we could cook a decent dinner and get a little sleep. Usually on a passage the seas are behind us or abeam and are less of an obstacle. It doesn't long for a little wind to build up sizeable seas and heading directly into them is not comfortable. We were burying the bow into wave after wave and, for all the wind we had, making slow progress against this wall of water. We wished for less wind. The old adage "Be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it" was true for us as well, since the wind and seas soon calmed to nothing.
The confused seas eventually turned into a lake and we saw little Velellas, matching their speed and point as we bobbed in the still, flat water. The calm conditions were a welcome respite once the seas flattened. We caught up on sleep, fixed more elaborate meals and felt confident enough to pull out the computer to get some weather faxes and write some emails. We saw little jellyfish on the surface and tiny electric blue creatures about 10 feet below the surface. But we weren't getting anywhere! We didn't have enough fuel to go far motoring so we knew we had to just wait it out, but the lack of wind became a test of patience. We sure missed our spinnaker and spinnaker pole that we busted on the way to the Marquesas. We began wishing for some wind, and eventually we were off again on another wild ride. (People pay good money for a ride such as this, blasting through waves and getting soaked as long as they know it will be over in 5 minutes.) After another day or so of being a sea torpedo, we were back to the windless flat calm seas we had previously. And we were more than ready to get there. Motoring became more appealing. We knew that a low-pressure system was coming and we needed to make landfall soon to avoid a predicted gale. And we were still hoping to arrive in time for a Thanksgiving celebration. So we did some motoring but the engine quit on several occasions. Garth opened the engine compartment while we slatted, trying to diagnose the problem. After changing filters and bleeding the engine a couple of times, we finally got the engine to keep running for more than 2 hours at a stretch.
We came into the Bay of Islands in New Zealand at about 11 o'clock at night, escorted by dolphins blasting past the boat like luminescent torpedoes. I felt the boat wobbling and some odd resistance on the tiller and realized that the dolphins were colliding with us! (Later we talked to a yacht that hit a large shark, which took out their autopilot.) We saw more navigation lights coming in to Opua than we've seen on our voyage since we left the U.S. Identifying the customs dock at 3 in the morning proved to be more challenging that we expected amidst all the various lights, but we finally pulled in and got some rest until customs and immigrations met us at 8am the following morning. We realized that we had a pretty good trip, even though it was not as pleasant for us as many of our other passages. We encountered no storms, no major equipment failures, injuries, or notable hardships.
We had heard that herbs and spices, sun dried tomatoes, dried red peppers, dried mushrooms, eggs and dried eggs, salami, fresh and lunch meats, cheese, milk, butter, honey, popcorn kernels, nuts, dried fruit, grains and, of course, fresh produce were all restricted from entry into New Zealand. We had been eating through our provisions fairly well all along and the limited selection in Tonga made it easy to eat through our existing stores. In Tonga, we cruisers traded food items that we had in excess to prevent it from going to waste. (Often we were able to obtain goodies from other cruisers that we had run out of.) So we spent our trip trying to eat all the restricted provisions so they wouldn't get confiscated upon our arrival in New Zealand. As we burrowed through our snack lockers, we were overwhelmed with just how many nuts we had been stockpiling. We were worried we couldn't finish it all, but the light winds gave us the extra time to eat through most of the restricted items. In fact, we did a good job of arriving with fairly empty lockers. Of course we had enough food for another month at sea, but not with a normal variety in our diet. Clearance was rather quick and painless and they were concerned about fewer items than we expected. We lost very few items to quarantine, only 2 cups of popcorn kernels, several cups of peanuts in shells, an opened container of butter, a small amount of cheese, some powdered eggs, open powdered milk, beef boullion (consomme style) and a jicama that we had bought in Mexico in March.
Happy Thanksgiving from Opua, New Zealand! We're celebrating at the Opua Yacht Club with other cruisers.
Here are the statistics for our trip:
Cheers,
Wendy Hinman and Garth Wilcox
S/V Velella (Wylie 31)