Position: 18:43.38S 174:06.04W 

Anchored in the bay at Vaka’eitu island.

This week we left town after getting some fresh provisions on Monday 26th August and sailed out to Vaka’eitu. It was a perfect day for a day sail again with 10-15kts of wind, flat water and sun with a few clouds. We chose to sail round the outside west side of the island to see if there were any whales out there and there was. We had to put an extra tack in just to stay out of their way!

We spent the next few days anchored in the beautiful protected bay at Vaka’eitu. Tuesday we went snorkeling and saw lots of colourful corals and fish at the nearby ‘coral gardens’, Wednesday we hiked across to the two little deserted beaches on the southeast tip of the island and Thursday we explored around the abandoned resort and north end of the island.

There is just one Tongan family living on Vaka’eitu right now and they were incredibly friendly and generous waving us over then chatting while they fed us with coconuts to drink and banana bread snacks before giving us more coconuts and a bunch of bananas to take back to the boat. We saw them through the week and were given more coconuts and bananas; we were able to help them out by keeping the bottle of shellfish they had collected in our fridge until they went to the market with it the next day and a gift of some old rope from the boat. The coconuts were perfect for some great evening cocktails of chilled coconut water, lime and rum drunk straight out of the coconut!

Probably the highlight of the week was when I woke one morning to a familiar whooshing sound and went up on deck to find a group of whales swimming right around the bay that we were anchored in playing and blowing out of their blowholes. When they finally moved on a turtle swam over to visit us instead!

See below for a few pictures.

Phil

 

 

Anchored in the bay:

Coconut drink time:

Connolly exploring near the north end of Vaka’eitu island: