Pangaimotu Island Paradise
Storyteller
Wed 13 May 2009 05:59
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Position, 21.07S 175.09W
A bit slack today in doing the blog thanks to 28
degree temperature and a couple of beers at lunch time. Ben and John deny that
there was any stress as we navigated our way through the reefs at dusk,
something we would never done had we not had a local on board.but my
state of anxiety was even greater than normal as we heard a 'panpan'
distress call from a yacht that had gone on a reef just as I was reading
the dire warnings on the electronic chart of reported uncharted reefs near to
our position. We knew from our trip to Tonga last year that the charts could be
very unreliable and that many of the navigation beacons would not be working. As
Ben hand steered, relying on his memory, we found that the charts on
our new chart plotter were accurate, which was an enormous
relief.
We anchored off Big Mamas 'resort' on
Pangaimotu Island, owned by the King and run by the famous Anna and Earl. Ben
had actually managed the island for a couple of years, so when he called them up
on the radio saying "Guess who?", there were squeals of delight from Anna aka
Big Mama. When we went ashore we took her a wahoo which we had caught earlier in
the day, which earned us a lot of brownie points and several free Kingfisher
beers. Big Mama produces top notch hamburgers served by her Gaugin
lookalike niece from the Niua Islands right at the north of Tonga from
where you can see Samoa.
Apart from doing a massive pile of laundry today,
we spent most of the morning receiving Customs and quarantine
officials who were visibly disappointed that we didn't have a mahimahi to
present to them. They were in luck, though, as they got to share our
wahoo which Anna had made into ota-ika--the Tongan version of the Tahitian
poisson cru. We've also been receiving lots
of curious visitors who are dying to check out an ocean trawler now that they
know it's possible to make an ocean passage under motor.
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