Tonga
Moxie - Beck Family Adventure
Mike, Denise, Asia and Aranya Beck
Mon 8 Sep 2014 04:58
05 sept 2014
We pulled into Tonga and passed two other family boats in the channel that we have not seen for a while, they were leaving, Moana Roa and Sudueste had both just checked out and were heading for Fiji. On the way to Tonga we lost a day, it simply vanished at the date line, we were time warped 24hours into the future.
Tonga is really different to the pacific so far, there are no fringing coral reefs here just loads of tiny islands and inlets, mostly with no beach and dropping very deep close to shore, a bit like Marlborough sounds in NZ. We have seen a couple of whales splashing in the distance but nothing close yet. Sunday is closed in Tonga and having fun is against the law. No work of any description, no games, no scuba diving.. Please do nothing at all on Sunday we were told.
Grocery stores are interesting, basically two isles with tins and packets. Flour and sugar is available in one kilo plastic bags, they just fill them from a sack. There is no warehouse or storage area, just a huge mess of bulk goods in full view next to the two shopping isles. As with the rest of the pacific every grocery shop is owned by Chinese people.
We have been for a dive today, Denise is getting more confident but needs more experience. We dove here and a couple of times in Nuie with a French couple, Francois has about 1000 dives and has been very good to help Denise gain confidence - also he has a compressor!
We decided also that we should have a dive compressor so ordered one a while back and it will be delivered here to Tonga in about a week we hope. Of course nothing ever is easy, we were expecting that delivery would probably be the headache but a worse one has hit us. The day after shipment of the compressor our generator died. It runs but produces no power, testing points to failed windings which is a major and not possible to fix here, we will probably live without it and wait till we get to NZ which is now very much on the cards. The biggest problem other than not being able to run the new compressor is that we cannot use the watermaker. In tonga at least we can fill water at the town dock in neiafu. Also we have the Honda petrol gen from moxie 1 but it is too small for the watermaker.
Ah well, no compliants, it hardly counts as trouble in this new paradise.