Over the weekend, 3 more boats arrived here - 2 of which we know from Samoa. On monday the weather front arrived, as did the customs agents to clear in the other boats - so they were ferried around in the drizzle and we got our passports stamped. We will pay our clearance fees when we go to get our inter-island clearance before leaving on Thursday. Manta finally left this morning as the wind had shifted back to the SE with the passing of the front. Not much else happened - we caught up on a fe

We arrived at Niuatoputapu safely. The entrance through the reef looks hairy from a distance but once you get "eyeballs on", it's pretty straightforward. There are good leading markers (though unlit - only the foolhardy do these passes at night!). Tafahi , the volcanic island we passed on the way in looks menacing in the distance. Niuatoputapu looks gorgeous and the spine is begging to be hiked... The only other boat here is Manta - a boat we know from the Gambiers and also more recently in S

It's easier to say "New Potatoes" than Niuatoputapu, and every cruiser knows where you mean! Niuatoputapu is one of the islands that makes up the Kingdom of Tonga. Anthony leaves us on the 29th of this month from the bottom island, Tongatapu - so we have a month to explore them with him, before he leaves. Niuatoputapu is the northernmost visited island and one of the smallest. It was very badly damaged by the 2009 tsunami which badly affected the south coast of Samoa and Pago Pago in American

Robert Louis Stevenson is a big deal in Samoa. He settled here as the climate was good for his TB and was accepted by the locals. In fact he made many friends with the chiefs. You can't visit Samoa without seeing his former home which is now a museum. We turned up and was surprised to find a huge corporate event being set up. With the garlands and "Gift Distribustion" tent we wondered what was going on. Alas it was the closing down of Samoa's largest private employer! We had a tour of the m

Trevor, the marina manager, recommended Dive and Snorkel Samoa as a better operation to go diving with then the more local one. Ty came and picked us up at 8am and we headed off to a small bay at the NE end of the island. We first had to pay the local to use their beach - in fact they had a little fale (guest hut) setup which we could use to shelter from the rain. It's unusual to be shore diving - it was Bonaire where we last did that. It was nice not to have to tow the dinghy too! The three o

Today we got a hire car and set off to explore. Tom from Running Tide was joining us as well. We first headed to Samoa dive & Snorkel to firm up arrangements for a 2 tank dive on Monday. They were out diving though, so we headed to the Papapapai-tai falls. Not quite what we were expecting though and nowhere near as impressive as Keiteur, but a nice view, nonetheless. From there we headed to Togitogiga Falls for some swimming. The hire car broke down here - the rough track threw the positive b

We knocked a couple of boat jobs off the list and rewarded ourselves with a "fiafia" - a Samoan musical and dancing evening along with a Samoan feast. We chose to go to Aggie Greys though it's now a very wish Sheraton. The feast was superb. The whole pig cooked in the traditional umukua style was incredibly succulent with wonderful crackling. Palusami, coconut cream wrapped in taro, was also very delicious. As the host for the evening said "You need to have firsts, seconds and thirds. If you d

So far, Samoa seems very pleasant. Everyone is very friendly and the officialdom was not at all onerous. We’ve opted to come into the marina - the appeal of 240v (and even better, 50hz!) shore power is pretty strong! We’re making good use of the air-conditioning :) As we came into the marina, the officials for Health, Quarantine and Customs were already on the dock and they jumped on almost before we’d finished tying up. In fact, Anthony did sterling work finishing off the mooring whilst

Monday August 21st 2017 is a day we’ll never forget - because for us, it never happened! A few minutes ago, we moved our clocks to Samoa time, which meant going from UTC-11 to UTC+13 - in effect, we crossed the date line. Although we’ve not crossed the antimeridian, Samoa is west of the date line for commercial and political reasons. Their partners in Australia, New Zealand and Asia were all a day ahead of them which meant they only had 3 working days a week where they overlapped. Monday in

Think this has been our worst night in the Pacific yet! Started on my 6pm-8:30pm watch and has been squalling with lots of heavy rain and very gusty and shifty winds since! This is what Amanda has just had to deal with and I replace her in 20mins. Not looking great, is it!

280nm to go to Apia, Samoa. We’re making reasonable progress - a bit slower than we’d like but our gennaker is giving us problems when furling. We need a good calm day to look at it - so thats on the bench for now. Its a bit too windy at times for the spinnaker - so we make steady progress with just our genoa. Still hoping to arrive in a couple of days as the wind is due to pick up a bit. We’ve heard from our friend Tom on Running Tide that he should arrive in Samoa around the same time a

Well, farewell to Suwarrow. Harry and Katu, the current rangers lived up to their billing as excellent hosts. Yes, they are there to enforce the rules and take some money from you, but they do so much more. For instance, Harry catches fish for the regular pot luck dinners - sometimes with the help of others cruisers who he teaches when needed. Katu barbecues the catch and it's shared by everyone. Katu also shows you how to husk coconuts properly. My skills definitely improved and we learnt quit

We anchored behind Anchorage Island and it seems like we should have reasonable protection from the forecast winds. It's definitely very pleasant here - within 30mins of arriving, the two rangers, Harry and Katu came out to do the formalities and relieve us of $60 for the three of us ($50 for the boat and 2 people, the rest for a 3rd person). Begonia, another catamaran that we met in Fakarava and also Maupiti is here. We've spoken to them and have some intel on where to go to see the Manta ra

It's 1am here. Amanda has been on watch for just under an hour and we are in lots of squalls. Anthony was lucky on his watch - no serious rain but lots of gybes to keep us going on course to Suwarrow. Amanda is getting the rain and it means I get wet too as furling the gennaker in windy conditions requires two. There is a trough sat right across this part of the Pacific which is giving us the last two nights of squalls. We hope that it is now on the move and that we can stop at Suwarrow until

Mo'orea is a very attractive island, and being so close to Tahiti, it is quite popular with tourists. It's an easy sail, or take one of the numerous ferries across. We didn't spend long there as we had to dash back to get the Iridium aerial liberated from customs, but we did enjoy it. We did a dive along the outside of the reef which had some fascinating "canyons" probably due to lava flows in the past. Plenty of fish too and a big lemon shark - but we think the rest of the sharks were up with

Only 250nm to go to Suwarrow now and today the sea state is better and the winds lighter (4/5 rather than 6/7). We’ve pulled out the gennaker again to keep our speed up, so arrival on Sunday morning (our time) is still looking likely. We’ll have a look at the anchorage to see if its tenable as by Sunday the winds will be picking up again. Our hope is that we can tuck in tight enough (the advantages of being a cat!) that we can get at least some protection from the SE. By Monday the winds lo

We are making good progress to Suwarrow, under 400nm to go this morning. The wind has swung to be directly behind us so we have now dropped the main and are just using the genoa alone. It's pretty comfortable onboard despite the large seas. It is however looking increasingly unlikely that we can stop at Suwarrow. We always knew this could happen in the Pacific but we have been lucky until now. This time it seems that there is a second front coming and with the strong SE winds forecast - that w

We got the opportunity to dive in Fakarava during the spawning of the Camouflaged or Marbled grouper. In fact I managed to dive the pass 13 times with friends from Nautilus, Jadean, Nahoa, Impulse, Masquenada and Running Tide at various times. Also with Anthony and Alistair of course. There were lots of grouper, covering the entire bottom. And lots of very happy sharks.. The video footage is more interesting but we don't have the bandwidth to upload those yet...

We bounced out of the pass at Maupiti, raised sail and set course to Suwarrow. After 3 fantastic months in French Polynesia, it was time to move on. We are somewhat behind with the blog, so a quick recap. We left Fakarava for Tahiti and had a great time there, not just servicing engines, but seeing the Heiva and enjoying life connected to a largish town! Our replacement satellite bits were shipped so we escaped to Mo'orea for some swimming with stingrays and diving. Then back to Pape'ete to

Sorry about the ‘radio silence’, but we’re having problems with our satellite system which looks to be hardware related (unable to transmit, though receive performance is fine). Our service provider is being ‘less than helpful’ because we didn’t buy the kit from them, despite relieving us of £600/month. I’m sure those in the boating world will know exactly who that is… We had previously bought kit from them and suffered their woeful service on warranty failure (2.5 months to rep