FARRFLY

AND ‘ERWIGOAGAIN;

June 2012 the Cyclone season officially over, Gus and Katja went ahead to Raiatea, relaunched FarrFly and sailed the 70 miles back to Tahiti. I followed two weeks later from London, with most of the business stuff done and the swag bag topped up.

Samina the babies and I had a most interesting cyclone season. We bought a family round the world B.A. air ticket.. good as long as we kept going more or less East. Flat bed Business Class for the same price as Tahiti to London return steerage!! Aagrreat deal; We flew to New Zealand and spent 6 weeks touring both North and South Islands in our ‘boat with wheels’ a camper van. We spent Christmas and new year in South island. In January we nipped over to Australia for a month, two weeks camper vanning up to the Whitsunday's, followed by two weeks in Byron Bay Beach hotel and finished off in the trip with 3 days in Sydney’s 5 star Shangri-La hotel.. Decided I’d better treat Dr. S after all the camping! We burned off the last two months of the South Pacific hurricane season at ‘home’ in Grenada.

We then went to London for a couple of weeks, whereupon I flew to meet the boat in Tahiti. Samina, Conrad and Charlotte-Oceane went to visit granny and granddad in Austria.The plan being that I would sail the boat the 2500 miles or so from Tahiti to Fiji and meet the gang in Fiji.. Thus saving the wild little nippers the potential ordeal of the long ocean passages, allow them time with gran and grandpa, and above all save the good Doctor the tedium of 2500 miles at “oonder tzen miles per hour.”

OFF TO THE COOK ISLANDS;

So its mid June I am held up in Tahiti waiting for a part for the generator fuel pump.

We need to pick up Smiley Jeff ‘Offshore, Ocean, Back-off, the Soup' Ryan in Rarotonga, which for the globally challenged reader is in the South Cook Islands.. naturally...

where ever the Cooks are some might say...

It is about a 4 day sail and we needed to get there before him so I ordered a new fuel pump from the UK agent and had it sent to the Soup himself in Dublin. So even if we had to leave Tahiti without the bits we would have a new one. As it happened the pump was fixed the day before we had to leave and so off we went.

No babies,

Spinnaker time...

Not to be..

No wind..

We motored most of the 800 miles to Rarotonga..

Doubly boring...

Got there the afternoon before Jeff arrived. He got in at some unGodly hour and went straight to bed. I set the alarm and got up at 5.30am to welcome him aboard, not realizing he was already in his bunk!!

We had reversed into the tiny harbor and tied up alongside a ketch that does day charters. Pleasant Oz couple. The harbor is being dredged and enlarged, but no matter what they do it is still wide open to northerly winds. I imagine the only thing to do in a northerly storm is to leave the harbor and sail off somewhere. There are no other ‘natural’ harbors, the tiny island being round and smooth like a coin.

The town itself is very nice, a one street affair, running along the shore. TraderJacks as the name implies is the place to imbibe. We added to our Tiki collection with a fine specimen of a ‘God’ as you can see from the pics.

Jeff and I hired a little Mazda MX5 for a day and drove around the whole island. It is a curious place.. a fishing holiday joint for New Zealanders on budget holidays, with a few 3 star resorts thrown in. We did the traditional Maori dinner show, not a patch on the one in New Zealand, but entertaining, it was a family affair and they are all talented, lovely singing which is quite typical all over Polynesia.

And after a pleasant piss up in TraderJacks it was time to head off again.. to Alofi... you must know where Alofi is? OK its forgivable not to put Rarotonga on the map given the next stop south is the Antarctic! Alofi on the other hand is the Capital City of Niue.

Hmm dont tell us you have never been to Niue? ‘Everybody does Niue’.

Ok even in a sail boat, blink and you miss it. But Niue is a fully evolved society with its own Royal Niue Yacht Club.. RNYC.

Its rather hard to find, (the country not the yacht club), its less than a dot in the Pacific. A fraction of the size of Rarotonga. I doubt if it can be seen from space, unlike Irelands National Debt which runs to the Moon and back. The Royal Niue Yacht Club is the highlight of the Capital. There was also a shop and loads of churches, a Tourist office, a cafe and a B&B. Smily Jeff bless his little Proddy soul felt very at home among his fellow Royalists... Which consisted of the Australian husband of the yacht club manageress...

Once you have found the country the rest is easy. The only harbor is so wide it is open to wind and wave from every angle, except over there. Its so wild you have to lift your dinghy out of the water! The town provides a big electric crane.. hook up your dinghy hit the red button and up she comes the 20 feet above the swell. Park her on the pier, all FOC and off you go.

Now; on our second day anchored off Alofi which is the same thing as been anchored off Niue, round like a coin, no natural Harbors.. heard this before?? I noticed that there was something very strange about this seafarers harbor, something very strange indeed: This is a nation immersed in, surrounded by, they are simply of the Ocean........ There were NO LOCAL BOATS, none anchored and NONE on the pier... No boats in Dun Laoghaire ? Following some intense interrogation over at the yacht club, it seems that the locals DO go fishing.. in boats... and “where are the boats?”. “Why in everyones front garden”.

BUT SAYS I, why don't they at least leave them down on the Pier, whats with taking all the fishing boats home on big trailers, with expensive Toyota Land Cruisers?

Oh thats easy to explain.. although the pier walls are 20 feet above high tide, the swell; when the weather is from anywhere other than East, BOOMS OVER THE PIER and will wash every boat away ... Hmm thinks I.. forget about my dinghy, “what about boats anchored in the bay?” Oh says the Yacht club, “you would want to be mad to anchor a yacht here... unless the weather is guaranteed to be from the East”. Guaranteed weather?... We didn’t stay too long... Especially when I noticed that no matter what the weather forecast; NO LOCALS EVER anchored their boats!

We spent 2 days exploring Niue.. Its a tiny but absolutely stunning little islet. There is no point in trying to describe the natural phenomena, just take a look at the pictures.. Its a perfect movie set. No matter where you go it is highly unusual. The island is the worlds largest ‘above water’ coral reef. The whole coral reef was pushed high up out of the water recently enough... so what should be under the Ocean you can now simply ‘walk in’.

Despite this Niue has a collapsing population. Only one in four houses is occupied. Most homes are abandoned. Property is worthless. You can buy a small house here for 100 dollars. Everyone under 40 has left for New Zealand, who thinking they were doing the Niuans a favor gave them all NZ passports. The people who stayed behind are unbelievably friendly. The local pub opens only on Sunday afternoon and as you can see we lucked in, Jeff drank the ‘honesty bar’ dry thinking the beer was free! It is a gas bar, you just go behind the bar, help your self and write in a book what you take each time. Tough trying to keep Ryan honest... We were just enjoying ourselves when the crew of Black Adder arrived... They left Rarotonga days before us.. I felt rather guilty for not noticing they had not made it to Niue before us.. Michael the aforementioned yacht club husband having already found us a car to rent, dragged the motley crew of the Adder to the pub in his lorry...

Then it was time to head off to Vava’u, but you got there first? A mere 300 miles from Niue.

Vava’u is the cruising mecca of The Kingdom of Tonga and sure enough when we got there here were loads of yachts lying on moorings in the deep but very sheltered harbor of Neiafu. A big change from Rarotonga where we saw only one other yacht, and Nieu where we saw all of two yachts and one was the same one.. Black Adder. The Moorings have a base here and I can highly recommend it. Its a cruisers dream, all short day hops, easy navigation, loads of uninhabited islands, sandy atolls, warm crystal clear waters.. the works.

En route for once the wind exceeded forecast and we had a great 20knt beam reach thundering along at 9.5knots, until I realized that if we kept up this speed we would fall upon the land in the dark. As there are no light houses and the charts are all a little inaccurate as they date back to James Cook, you do not arrive in the dark. So we shortened sail, 8 knots, hmm, dropped the main, 7.5 knots.. just goes to show how useless a main is, rolled up the rest of the Genoa.... no sails up.. still doing 4.5 to 5 knots... “damn you Bruce Farr!”. However it was just slow enough and we arrived off the coast of Tonga at dawn. Also I slept much better in the knowledge that Ocean Ryan was on watch with no sails up. Not even Smily Jeff could cause chaos without any sails.

The pictures tell The Tale of Tonga much better than I.

However I will bring your attention to the restaurant with the goat as the guard dog and/or waiter. It was equally hopeless at both tasks, but then having just sailed yet another 1000 miles of Ocean with The Soup Ryan I am well used to that level of efficiency.

During the sing song that followed the dinner, The Soup decided to play a kind of wooden digery doo thing, that was, until the goat started to bark and howl at the Moon. The guitar playing ‘Fir an Ti’ gently took the digery doo from Jeff, who later put it down to professional jealousy after what Jeff thought was a rousing duet with the goat.

PHOTOS OF LAST DAYS IN TAHITI & MOOREA

Busy fishing, tell them to call back...

These two lads are Irish, working on the super yachts out of Tahiti

Goodbye Moorea

Goodbye Tahiti.. after been based there for 8 months or more

The fish never seem to have the same big smile.

Harry flatters on the way to Rarotonga

Stunning sunsets

No where else

in this world do

you get sky scapes like the south pacific

Gus catches them and Katja makes up some 5 star dinners.
living well without the loved ones!!

Rarotonga at dawn.. exciting what...
Actually more exciting than you think.. one for future blogs

One of the worlds most shallow and obscure harbours

the deep section is so small we had to reverse in!
Two meters to our port side the water is one meter deep!!

fishing is the tourist attraction, there is an airport..
obviously or else Jeff swam there!

Add caption

well built these Tiki Gods

Now this is Trader Jacks..
If I can in another blog this pub will come up again...

Smily smiling already

Getting ready bound for Niue

A dusk departure to arrive in daylight

How the light changes

full moon rising, lucky omen for Jeff's first night

Harry flatters again

All the way to Niue

With gus aboard we will never run out of food

No wind, just rain and smiles

Niue harbour, as open as the Bay of Biscay.

The infamous crane... but who's the menace on the helm?

Would you ever tell we were Paddies!
Dressed like Italians!

FARRFLY at anchor in one of the worlds most open harbors

This point over looks the 'harbour'. Aptly named.

Niue Yacht club, michael in the back ground organising a rental.

STUNNING NIUE

Look out Jeff

Oh Shit,

Niue is the most extraordinary place we have seen so far.

The honesty bar

Jeff as happy as larry thinking the beer was free..

Black Adder boys, Jeff doing barman.

The crane again next day.

Nice resort on the cliffs.

Volcanic rock as sharp as a knife.

A forest of it.

A beach

with

no sea...
cut off from the ocean by volcanic rock falls.

Black adder again!

Only one in four houses is occupied.
Reminiscent of Irish villages after the Famine.

Great photo.

under ground fresh water spring..

Under ground for a swim.

Yep Niue has it all..

Nice sheltered harbor!!

Pretty girl

Coast of Tonga.. Vavu'a at dawn

Sometimes I need sunglasses due to the glare from the teeth!

Very sheltered cruising grounds, a little like the Virgin Islands.

Cave sky light.

The caves near Neiafu

Neiafu Fridays race about 12 boats!

Roy from the North and Clontarf.. The only other Irish boat in the Pacific.
We had heard about him over a year ago. As it happens I remember him from his brief visit
to Prickly bay.. Grenada.