Author Archives: CB

Gonna slap a little sailing lexicon on ya.

When a person that owns a boat says their boat is “on the hard”, and they are not in tears. They typically mean the boat is in storage, out of the water and on dry land, usually in a boatyard somewhere.

Which, as it turns out is the exact situation we are in right now, and have been for the last 3 or 4 months.

We arrived here in Tonga on the 12th of October 2015. Spent a 6 weeks or so checking out the islands, beaches, reefs and anchorages around the Vava’u island group until the 2nd of December when we had to put the boat on the hard….*wink* and have been living in a shitty little apartment since.

You might be asking yourself, “why not just stay on your boat, on the hard”.

Answer: Cause it sucks.

So how does a boat go from this:

To this?*

Watch this informative video to find out.

By the way, if you ever find your self in Tonga and need a place to store your boat. Stop in and say hi to Joe and Alan at The BoatYard in Tonga. Great guys and they will totally take care of your boat.

*The keen eyed reader will note that the picture of Palarran at anchor was taken in Fatu Hiva, Marquesas. So technically, you would have to add a couple thousand miles of awesome downwind, open ocean sailing** into the mix before you get to the haulout in Tonga.

**And a couple hundred miles of butt clinchingly terrifying miles too. Sorry to any dudes out there trying to talk their wives into this doing this trip….it’s just part of the package. Crossing an ocean is NO SHIT for real. :)

We are currently in Tonga, but I thought I’d back up and bit and see if I could get the blog caught up alittle since I last posted from Bora Bora.

Sorry about this, but this post comes with some extra credit reading.

Before you continue, follow a couple of the links below or do a little googling of your own on Palmerston Atoll and/or William Marsters.

Downtown Palmerston Atoll

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmerston_Island
http://www.cookislands.org.uk/palmerston.html#.Vntd4hV97Dc
http://www.palmerstonisland.net/

The history of this little Atoll is pretty interesting.

As you read…or actually most likely did not read…lazy bastards, the history of this little Atoll in the absolute middle of no where is pretty unique.

We arrived at the island in the middle of the night and waited till day break to approach the mooring field. There is no anchorage and the family on the island would rather you take a mooring ball instead of anchoring on the coral.

The island is part of the cook islands, but they sorta run them selves. We were told to remain on the boat until customs and immigration came out to clear us in.

All went fairly well. We felt pretty bad for the health and welfare lady, she got violently sea sick when she came aboard to “inspect” the boat. The inspection lasted about 3 minutes until she went back outside to vomit.

The moorings are owned and ran by Edward Marsters, who also may or may not be the sheriff of the island. He also was our “host” while we were there. They do not like you to come ashore on your own. So your host will come out in the morning and pick everyone up and take you ashore. Their custom is to host you and feed you while you are there on the island. And that is exactly what they did. Every day around 10am, Edward would come out and pick us and the other 3 boats that were there up and take us to shore to his house and feed us a big lunch.

LUNCH!!

Ed Marsters and one of his sons John. Entertaining us after lunch

The rest of the day we would wander around the little island and visit with other families or check out the school. There are about 60 people living on the island. 30+ of that number are school aged kids.

The little school house

We had been hauling around some school supplies with us since we left Panama. So Tawn gathered them all up and donated them to the School. The principle was very appreciative and gave Tawn a Tshirt from the island and a card that all the kids made for her and signed. She also asked Tawn to give a little presentation/talk about her old job to the kids. They were all amazed since they were familiar with the american TV show CSI.

We ended up spending about a week there. Everyone on the island was very nice. They don’t get very many visitors, only about 60 or 70 visiting boats stop there each year, and only 3 or 4 supply ships make a stop. So it’s a bit of a deal when people do make it there.

Checking out the town.

You can just barely see our boat anchored just outside the reef

The little village in town is just picture perfect. Someone is out raking the “streets” every day. Every were we went on this island, the roads and paths were soft sandy walk ways. There are no cars, just a couple of ATVs and scooters.

John, our tour guide.

Picture perfect little town

As we were checking out the town and talking to everyone, I ask how they got internet access. They pointed me over to the “phone company”.

Internet!!

Just step up to the window and pay the guy a few bucks and he’ll hook you up with some island wide internet access! Seriously, the future is NOW!! It’s slow…but it is now.

Server room at the Telecom

One last picture before I end it.

Yup, seems just about right.

Palmerston island is one of those places in the world that is almost impossible to get to. So to be able to have gone there on our boat is very cool experience and one we will remember for a long time.

This post falls under the full disclosure category. I figure it’s only fair that if I post all these stories about how much fun we are having and all the awesome stuff we are seeing and doing. I should also, from time to time tell you about the not so awesome stuff.

I’m just gonna give you the ending right up front. Bit of a spoiler, I know.

But the short story is that we ran aground a couple weeks ago. Oops!

The long story is:

We had been here in Bora Bora for about a week. Decided to head around the island and check out some of the anchorages on the North side of the island. It is very beautiful over there for sure.

We followed the charts and advice from other boaters and got to the spot we intended to go. But another, closer look at the charts and a read through some of our cruising guides showed another anchorage a little further up. Granted, the cruising guide said that unless you draw less than 6 feet, do not attempt to get in there. The pass through the coral is narrow and very shallow.

We draw just over 6 feet. So despite all the warnings, we thought we should give it a go.

As we were approaching the small pass in the coral, Tawn was on the bow giving me directions on which way to go. I was looking at the charts and thought I should be more to starboard, but Tawn was insistent that I go more to port and get as close to the channel marker as I possibly could.

There was a good current running through the little pass against us and the wind was on the nose, so as I was turning more to port we were being pushed a bit sideways and next thing I know…..Bump, bump, bump.

We stopped moving.

The wind and current pushed us abit more up on the coral. Tawn dropped the anchor to stop us moving in the bad direction.

I tried reversing off, but we were stuck hard.

Luckily we were towing the dinghy. We grabbed our stern anchor and put it in the dinghy and I ran it out to port into deeper water to use as a kedge to hopefully pull the bow around and off the reef. But the wind and current was just too much. We were stuck and stuck pretty good, and heeling over avbit.

A few tourist boats came by and waked us pretty good, which was shitty, but it’s what they do best.

As we were planning what to do next, another cruiser came over from the anchorage in his dinghy and offered to help.

We decided to pull up the kedge and re-run it off the back of the boat, which should pull us back the way we came and into deeper water. Tawn raised the first anchor we had down. Then ran back to the cockpit to crank in on the newly re-positioned kedge anchor.

The guy that came to help, used his dinghy to push the bow of Palarran into the wind and to prevent us from getting even more stuck now that the front anchor was up.

With him pushing on the bow, Tawn cranking the stern anchor in on the winch, I put the engine in full reverse and…..slowly…slowly we started backing up. Then poof, we were off the reef and in deep water.

We had to drop the anchor line in order to keep backing off the reef. The guy that was helping us retrieved our anchor for us,

We changed our minds in trying to get into that anchorage. :) We to another close by to dive on the boat and check for damage. Other than some scrapes in the bottom paint and a few very small chunks of fiberglass missing from the bottom of the keel there was no damage at all.

All told we spent about 20 minutes stuck. Maybe half an hour.

All is good and we were back to business as usual in a couple hours.

A couple days later we rented a couple bikes and rode around the island. It’s only 32km(which is Canadian for 19.8 miles) all the way around the island.

We stopped and took a picture of the spot we got stuck. No way in hell we were taking pictures at the time.

We were headed from left to right as you look at the picture, and any of my SoPac mates can probably clearly see where the channel is in that pic. Right were you see the channel end on the right is were it goes from 14 feet to 6.5. Which is fine, but I should have hooked it more left and hugged that marker, which would have kept me in 6.5 feet of water…instead I went more straight and ended up in 6 feet of water…which was no good.

Here is a pic to get us all back in the right frame of mind.