We left American Samoa at three in the morning so we had to spend the previous day preparing Fearless. There were all the same things we normaly do to prepare and some extra. We had to get all the laundry done as there were machines here that were a dollar a load and after months on end of doing my laundry by hand it was time to empty the boat out and start over. One of the other really fun jobs fell to Brett: the bacteria rich harbor water had encouraged a slimy grass to grow on our anchor chain and it had to be scrubbed off. Luckily the grass only grew on the first fourty feet of the anchor chain so it only took Brett three hours to scrub off the nasty slime with me on the bow controling the accent and decent of the anchor chain. Brett was covered in yuckiness and by the time we had readied the boat we were more than ready to put the dirty water of American Samoa behind us and forge out into the clear blue that awaited us. I have never been so ready to leave an anchorage.

The sail to Nuiatoputapu was uneventful, we were very prepared and the weather was calm so we made good time and arrived in the late morning. As we approached the anchorage there was a problem. First: the charts were off; second: there were two markers in the entry that were not on our charts. We were coming closer and closer but still could not make any sence of the two giant red poles that were looming in front of us and the tension was getting very high when we started to go through our options. Since the poles looked red they should be put to our port side (South Pacific is all like this: the red/right return policy does not work here!), however were they really red? They did not have the square or the triangle marker on the top of the pole that the channel markers normally have. But the real problem that was we could see waves breaking on either side of the markers and were not sure if we were headed straight into the reef.

Brett got on the radio and asked if anyone in the harbor could give us some advice on the entry and a Dutchman with a tentative grasp of the English language got on the radio and started a long monolog on the approach and how we should come in from one hundred and eighty degrees and keep the island to our port side. This took a very long time since there were a lot of “umms” and “haas” but not once did this man take his finger off of the transmit button so we were forced to listen to this unhelpful advice as we got closer and closer. Finally another person was able to get a word in when he took his finger off the transmit and yelled out, “go between the markers!” which was all we needed to hear and we corrected our course, though we were still pretty far off into the far side of the channel by now. I was up on the bow looking out for coral heads and thinking that we were in really deep shit if we hit anything. With our speed reduced and the wind blowing on our beem Fearless was not responding quickly to the stearing and it was more than once that I had to change my plans and take a coral head to starboard instead of port as we were drifting that way anyway. After making it safely into the harbor we were both a little shocked at the terrible markings in the entrance (worst we have seen on the entire trip so far) and, despite the fact that we were anchored a good three quarters of a mile from the dock, we were on dry land according to the chart plotter.

We sat on our boat with our yellow quarantine flag flying and waited. In Tonga you do not go to land until the officials have come and cleared you in, this proccess is further complicated by the fact that the officials have neither VHF radio or a boat to come out and meet you. So you must keep a sharp eye on the dock and when you see them arrive in their van you are to go and pick them up and return to your boat with them so that they can inspect it. It did not take long. Soon we were engulffed in the pressance of four large Tongans who lingered in our boat and answered our questions but made little effort to maintain a conversation. We were not sure what the deal was: is this a cultural difference where they do not feel the need to fill the air with noise? Are they waiting for us to offer them bribes, gifts, etc? Are they that bored that they would rather hang out on our boat and relax? These questions became academic as Brett’s stomach started to growl and he could wait no longer to eat. With a coment from one of the officials that they do not get to have meat on the island often since they have no refrigeration Brett offered up a feast of burgers and they were more than happy to accept. We sat and ate our burgers, I think that they really enjoyed them as they do not often get tomatoes or lettus here either and I went all out and put on some pickles as well. the burgers prompted a surge of hospitality and we were soon offered lunch on Sunday and the delivery of some eggs which we had been inquiring after. When they took their leave Brett and I were left to shake our heads at the strangeness of it all and wondering at the cultureall differences that make one set of people act in a way that is to us so very odd.

We had left American Samoa on the ninteenth of August but it had taken us a day at sea and in that day we had crossed the international date line. So we arrived on the twenty first and had skipped through time into tomorrow. Brett made a reservation at the “resort” for the night of my birthday and we planned to take the day relaxing and have a nice meal out after completing our check in proccess which consisted of changing money and paying customs. When we walked through town I got a real taste of how far removed we were.There were more pigs than people running around, no electricity on the island and the roads were all dirt. We were able to get a ride easily as there was only one road going accross the island and anyone with a car was on it and was more than happy to pick you up and deposit you along the way.

We got directions to the customs office, and you would think that it would be fairly concise since there was only one road and the town was really small. I should have known when the woman told us to go right as she pointed left that there was a lapse in communication but we decided (wrongly) to go with the verbal instructions and got a good long walk for our troubles. We were also told that we should find the “white building” so we were a little surprised to find that most of the buildings were actually painted white. Hmm….

That night we got ready to go into town for my birthday dinner and were reconfirming our “taxi” (I use this term loosly to describe the guy with the car). But when we told her that we were reconfirming she was very confused as she wanted to know if they were not already there? Apparently we had not set our clocks correctly and we started off for dinner a half hour behind our reservation. Getting there proved to be an adventure ina and of itself. We were dropped off at a beach and there was a man waiting there for us to escort us accross the reef. We walked for a quarter mile in water that reached at times up to my knees and had small talk with our guide. We discovered upon reaching the resort that she is basically the only person who lives on her island that is seperated from the main island by the shallow reef, we were the only guests at the restaurant, or the resort for that matter, so we got her undivided attention. She has had this property for some time and has been developing it but is having a hard time filling her cabins as Tonga Airlines has reduced service to the outer islands and the only way to currently reach her resort is by boat. The only boat that is currently searving Nuiatoputapu is not exactly what I would call a pleasure craft, with cargo strapped to every available inch and passengers crammed into rusty bunks or sleeping on deck there is no wonder that she can not fill her rooms. We had see the supply ship when it had come in that morning and it was a real piece of work. We had a brief walk through the interior and as the rusty steps disintegrated beneath my feet and the smell of urine filled my lungs there was no doubt that if this was my sole means of travel I think that I would be staying home.

Dinner was good, though it started with an appology that since there was no air service to the island there were no fresh veggies. But we had the place and the proprieter, Laura, all to ourselves. After our dinner and a glass of wine we sat and talked to Laura and got some of the inside scoop on Tongan life and her perspective of living on such a remote island. We had missed the sunset due to our late start and by the time we were done with dinner it was a dark moonless night and the tide was up. We were told that they would give us a dinghy ride back to the island and we clammored in the dinghy to see that there was no motor. That was okay, our guide from earlier that evening took hold of the rope and towed us back accross the reef, the water never got above his chest and it was a hysterical end to a nice dinner. We had wanted a taxi back since we had not thought to bring a flashlight and it was really the only option for us since there are no street lights to think of and we had only found this location once during the daylight. Wandering aimlessly accross the island really did not seem like a good idea. On top of this I was getting one of my famouse migraines and was itching to get home where I could hole up and take some medicine to get me right again.

The taxi was not close to where we had left him so we had to walk to a few houses before we found the taxi driver at a kava ceremony, it seemed that every male in the village was here drinking kava and we could hear their singing from the road as we approached. It was one of those moments in our journey that I will always remember: the pitch black of the night and our guide (who was soaking wet) walking us from house to house until we came upon the taxi man (who may have simply been the first man he found with a car who wanted to make a quick buck). He was obviously under the influence of kava and he stummbled back to his car with bleary eyes to take us back into the darkness and down the dirt road to the safety and comfort of our home. My migraine was getting to new heights and I was so bummed as this is not the way I want to spend my birthday and there was a bevvy of interesting things all around but all I could think of was to get home and close my eyes in blessed darkness.

We arrived back at the dock and I was in for a big shock. The dinghy was gone. Where once there was our dinghy there was a patch of disturbingly empty water. On this little island? Probably one of the safest places we have ever been? On my birthday?!? As I came unraveled we came up with a plan, we were going to have to get in touch with a boat from the harbor and get a ride back to Fearless. We were in shock and it was hard to even remember the names of the boats that were in the harbor. This was not improving my migraine.

We were able to reach Second Wind, a boat we were familiar with and had seen in the past. Sophie came out and took us back to our boat. We asked if they would help us look for the dinghy but it was a lost cause: they only had a two horse power motor on a hard dinghy and it was blowing pretty hard, it was also very dark and not a good night to be trolling out around the reef. We settled into Fearless for the night and I was distracted from worrying about the dinghy by the fact that my migraine had reached epic proportions. I spent the rest of the night puking my guts out.

The next day Brett went into town and I stayed in bed. He went to the police and the port captain and spoke to the captain of the supply ship. They searched for the dinghy but it was long gone. During the day when Brett was out and about we got an offer from a Dutch boat called Gaia. They said they had a spare dinghy that they could sell us and that it was new! They did not want to dig it out unless we wanted it as it was burried pretty deep but they had a photo of it in their catalog. So, after we discussed it with each other and realized that we were essentially trapped on our boat we decided that we would take the dinghy. They wanted one thousand dollars for it, the list price in the catalog. They had a motor for it as well and we started to feel like maybe things were not so bad, after all this was very good luck to have a boat in the harbor with a new dinghy that they could sell us. We rushed into the decision and it went really wrong, really fast.

We knew it was a six foot dinghy and were ready for it to be small but when they brought it over to our boat I was shocked by how small it really was. It was tiny! The length was one thing but the tubes on the dinghy were also very small giving it a waterline that was barely above four inches. We tried to put a good face on it and made jokes about how small it was, how we went from a Cadallac to a Pinto and generally tried to keep our spirits up by pokeing fun at our misfortune. We had been invited to go to lunch at one of the local’s houses and so I got dressed in my Sunday best and we clammored into the little thing.

It was all fun and games when we were looking at the little thing from the safety of Fearless but when I descended into it and felt the floor shift under me it was a totally different story. We motored into three inches of chop and got soaking wet. I had a towel that I had brought along to use as a shield but even though I was able to deflect the splash it was irrellevent: the water that came over the front pooled in the bottom of the dinghy and I was soon sitting in two inches of water. Brett was putting up a brave show of it and trying to laugh it off and stay possitive but as it all sank in how we were now without our dinghy and I sat in my favorite skirt in a pool of water my face was covered with salt water that was not from the ocean.

We work so hard on Fearless, she is our baby and our project, she is our full time job and our means of recreation. Now she is crippled like a limbless dancer with a bad prosthetic. The inconvenience of it all was waring with the indignity. There was no good side to this situation. And this thing was worse than a Pinto, it was more like a tricicle. Lunch was nice and we had an opportunity to talk to Sia and her husband, Niko. They were warm and friendly and she had cooked a real Tongan meal, we tried to not talk about the dinghy too much but the pain was still very fresh and I was soaking wet. Sia and Niko felt so bad for us and told us that they wished we had called on them that night and they would have gone out and helped us right away, I wish we had known at the time as it may have been possible to do a propper search for the dinghy at night when it had only been drifting for one or two hours. The food was… interesting. They had invited all the cruisers from the harbor so we got to meet the ones who had given us the terrible instructions on how to get into the harbor and found that bad English was not their only downfall. As we talked about our friends who were coming on a 55 foot power boat the wife of the couple got very nasty about power boaters in generall. It was such a broad generaliztion I found it a little offensive. I personally prefer sailboats but eveyone can make a choice as to what they want to travel in, right? She kept going on and on about how “showy” they were and they were obviously from “new money.” These were pretty nasty comments, expecially since they were about a friend of ours, but I bit my toung and tried to make small talk. In the end Sia and Niko were much better company than the cruisers and we ended up inviting them over for cocktails after the brunch. That first trip from our boat to shore was the only opportunity we had to see the motor actually work. We had to paddle back to Fearless from our lunch date, at least the wind was at our back! We knew after rowing her that we still really had no dinghy, there was no way to paddle this dinghy into the wind and it was very unsafe.

That night, at one thirty in the morning, as I recovered from the shock of the dinghy loss and our pathetic replacement we were roused from sleep with the sound of a mayday being called on the VHF. In sailing terms a mayday is akin to yelling fire. It is an all points bulletin, a cry for help that can not be ignored by any other mariner. This is the cry of a vessel in extreem danger. Life or property are at risk and this is not a call put our lightly. In American waters if you put out a mayday you surrender your control of the vessel to the coastguard, if they come to your rescue you are at their discretion. If they tell you to evacuate you must.

There was a boat on the reef, an aluminum boat that drafted only three feet had managed to get three hundred feet into a coral reef that is dry during low tide. It was high tied but slacking fast and it was amazing that they had gotten that far in. The same boat that had tried to give Brett navigational help came on the radio and was getting a bunch of information from them (Oh, Um, Yah, well?). And as the boat was hitting the coral they were telling them that they could not reach Niko (the only person in the village with a 40HP engine and a panga big enough to tow a big yacht off of the reef) and that they would “stand by on channel 16 in case anything changed.” Brett was looking at me unbelieving what he was hearing. The only thing that was going to change was that the tide was going to go out and the boat would then be aground. We sat and waited for this guy to finnish talking (why is it that those who have nothing important to say always take the longest time to say it?), as soon as he did Brett got on the radio and told him that the tide was going out and that he should go in and get Niko. Brett practically had to twist his arm and told him twice! He then said “Okay, I will have to get dressed first and then I will go and get Niko.” He had the nerve to sound put upon by the logic of this request. (Brett would have been in the dinghy fifteen minutes ago but we had no motor and it was a long row into a wind that was pushing offshore, we didn’t need two rescues for one night!)

Niko came out and was at our boat to get Brett and then went to a few others to get any able bodied men. He dropped off Sia and we sat and drank tea and watched the drama unfold. As the boys cruised out there I could see their search light and the navigation lights from the yacht as well as the channel markers. I watched as the panga approached the sailboat and saw the mast head light take a sickening thirty degree angle to their cockpit lights and stay in that possition for twenty seconds, I thought they were sunk. Litterally. But the boat lights were slowly revolving and then moving forwards, making their painfull progress to safety. Occasionally on the VHF I would hear the captain of the stranded boat yell, “We are hitting, we are hitting!” It was nerve wracking but it only took two hours to pull them off of the reef and another hour to get them situated with their hook down. The gratefull captain then invited all aboard for some drinks and crackers. It was four in the morning before Brett was back on Fearless.

Over the next few days we were acting as if we still had no dinghy. We had made an arrangement with the folks on Gaia that we may not want to keep the motor as it was old and so we gave them a call and told them to please come and pick up the motor, we would not be needing it. As they were on the way over, however, Brett looked at me and said, “You know we really can’t use this dinghy?’ We decided that we were going to have to give it back to them and when they came over Brett broached the subject. We knew that they had not wanted to dig it out and so Brett offered them one hundred dollars for their trouble and said that we were very sorry but we had realized that we were throwing good money after bad and we could not afford to give them $1000 for a dinghy that was not even usefull as a backup for us. As they sat there and conversed in Dutch in front of us for a five minutes it became increasingly clear that they did not want the dinghy back and were in fact not going to take it. Brett told them again, “Look, we just had a $5000 dinghy stolen that we are going to have to replace. We really can’t afford to buy this dinghy and we feel bad that you had to dig it out. How about I offer you $200 to take the dinghy back?” Again, they refused and I was standing there with my jaw on the ground and unable to believe what was happening. Were they really so mercinary and insensitive that they would take advantage of a boat in a remote harbor that had just had their dinghy stolen???? They were!

I was horrified! To have something stolen from you is par for the course and a thing you always have in the back of your mind as a possibility. After all, when they look at us we are rich beyond measure. So while I do not approve of the theft I certainly understand it. But to have a fellow cruiser screw you in this way was beyond the pale. They know what we are up against here, the time and effort it takes to get out here and how when we are out at sea we relly on each other. There is no coast guard here to rescue you if you screw up, as had just been proven last night when everyone in the harbor had to work together to rescue the boat on the reef! Most crusiers are very aware of this and as a result there is a real comraderie between cruisers and they act in support of one another. So when it finally sunk in that they were going to keep our money and leave us with this dinghy that was no use to us after we had just been robbed I got a jolt of adrenaline the likes of which I seldom see.

As we pushed their dinghy away from our boat we told them they were trash in no uncertain terms. They looked at us as if we had gone crazy. As if this type of behavior was acceptable and they were in the right. Their argument was that we had “made a deal.” Wow!! The audacity of it all still makes my hands shake. The only upside to this situation is that it is a relief to meet an asshole who is not American: apparently we do not have a corner on the market.

To add to our discomfort and feelings of seperation from the fleet the boat that had gotten stranded on the reef, after being rescued at the wee hours of the morning offered Niko $400. Niko had woken up in the middle of the night, put his life and his boat at risk and had suffered damage to both his prop and his boat. If Niko had not been there to rescue his $800,000 boat he would have been aground and his boat had already lost propulsion so it would have stayed on the reef for good. In most waters a tow off of a reef is $5000 on the spot or they sit and watch as your boat breaks apart, no checks accepted and it is common enough knowledge that most boats carry at least this ammount in cash. And here this cheep bastard was offering $400. It was embarrassing to watch.

With the weather forcasting light winds we got out of town, I could not stand to be surrounded by these people any more. They were either incompitent, greedy or cheep bastards and it was so out of character for the cruising fleet that I felt I had stepped into a seldom seen twilight zone of disgruntled assholes. I still can’t help looking out the back and seeing the place where the dinghy usually hangs, the absance hurts. However, when Brett and I discussed it we realized that if we could exact revenge on either the people who stole the dinghy or the people who sold us that little piece of crap and refused to take it back we both would rather see the folks on Gaia suffer, man they pissed me off!

We had sent out an email to the cruisers that we knew and it was in no time that we were offered a dinghy for use while we are in Vava’u and a deluge of support. Back in the bossom of the fleet! It was so nice to be surrounded by friends and to have some support, people offering to look for a dinghy for us so that we would have one once we arrived, offers of rides when we first arrived since some people were unsure if we were still stranded on our boat. It has been very heartwarming and I really have appreciated all of the support. We re-celebrated my birthday in style and ended up with 20 cruisers taking over a restaurant. Like a breath of fresh air they filled my heart with gratitude to be surrounded by such wonderful people.

We have been in Tonga for a week now and it has been great, the weather has been terrible but the town is really nice. It is stuffed with cruisers who ended their journey here and started buisnesses so it is really set up for us. Most of the buisnesses have VHF radios and you can make a dinner reservation or get a really comprehensive weather report from the comfort of your boat. It is so nice that I can see why so many move here, there is a real draw.

Every Friday there is a friendly yacht race in the harbor. Yesterday we were invited to crew on Macy, a boat that we have been sailing with since Suwarrow. It is a smaller boat but we showed very well and came in third, those in the know told me that if they had given us the handicap for our waterline we would have won the race for sure. It was my first race ever and it was a real treat to do so well. Also in the race was the Ramora, and everyone that we talked to said they did not care who won so long as he did not. We had a solid lead but we were caught by our arch nemisis as he cut us off on a turn. We knew he had us on waterline alone so once we were behind him we had lost the race. In the spirit of team work we pealed off and gave Blizzard, the boat that was coming up behind us, some room so that we would not steal their wind and they were tight on the Ramora’s tail for the rest of the race. In the final leg of the race we had to tack back to the finish and the Ramora had a stong lead but he tacked too early and Blizzard took the finish line with a boatlenght. We were all very happy as we knew we were not going to win, we just wanted to be sure that he did not. It was kudos all around as we got third, but more importantly we got the assist for first place. Racing is fun!