We rejoined the ship after our adventures on Rarotonga and set sail for the islands of the Kingdom of Tonga on the evening of 26th August to try and get ahead weather closing in.
After a couple of days at sea, my friend Gerda had a fall and hit her head rendering her unconscious for a short time after which she was Ok only to discover she’d broken her wrist. Our onboard doctor, Esther applied a splint and contacted the emergency radio doc for advice. After four days with some nice sailing we finally sighted the island of Vava’u in the North of the Kingdom. During this time at sea we crossed the international dateline, going to bed on Sunday night only to wake up on Tuesday morning having lost Monday, or at least 23 hours. Before docking in Vava’u we spotted whales in the distance, probably humpbacks. Most of us signed up for a whale swimming trip the next day, kindly organised by Tom, one of the Darwin team camera crew.
We all rose early on Wednesday morning and took the dinghy to meet our whale watching guides and get kitted out with wetsuits etc. We headed straight out to sea quite some distance on two guide boats. The humpbacks come to these islands with calfs and boats are not permitted within 100m so our experienced guides tried to guess where the whales would surface and raced ahead to drop no more than five of us in the water before backing off to a safe distance. After several attempts we had no luck and the sea was getting pretty rough. We decided to head back closer to the island and on our 5th swim we were in luck, we bobbed around in the water clutching each other to stay together and finally saw a whale come up from the deep really close and we were all absolutely thrilled, what an experience.
We left the main port of Neiafu in Vava’u the next day still buzzing from our whale adventure and motored round to swallow cave some went in for a swim in the cave while others went in the the dinghy. Tom and Josh did some amazing underwater filming in the cave. Back onboard we headed South to the tiny island of Katafanga for a lunchtime stop and maybe a swim. After leaving Katafanga we sailed South towards Tongatapu past the islands of Tofua and Kao where Bligh landed after the mutiny on the Bounty but was warded of by locals and lost ten men. Finally arriving at Tongatapu late at night and anchored off shore, next morning the pilot took us to just outside the port and anchored again and after clearing customs we went on shore.
This was the end of leg 21 of the voyage which meant I had to leave the ship for one night, unfortunately I had no where to stay but Gerda kindly offered to share her room. There was heavy rain so we checked in and just sat all afternoon watching the rain. There wasn’t a lot to do as almost everything in Tonga shuts on Sundays. The next day Mark and Luya cane by with the car but Mark injured his leg running across the road so I took over driving duty. We packed the car and took Gerda to the airport. Once she was checked in we said it drove to the local hospital to get mark’s leg checked out. We spent quite a bit of time at the hospital and Mark got thoroughly examined and left with a pair of crutches. No seemed to want to take payment for the treatment though. We headed back to the ship, and I said my fair wells to Luya and Mark.
Voyage stats: 12 days onboard, 40 night hours, 1174 nautical miles