Fiji to Tonga passage, 04-10-14 to 10-10-14

Our lights are broken again. I just don't understand. I'm tempted to just chuck the whole fixture out and get a new one, but then that would be the third we'd bought in under a year. Which is ridiculous. The bulb jiggles loose downwind, and now it stops working upwind as well. The anchor light comes and goes, which is fun. We'll inspect it further after we've rested and recovered. But I'm so sick of lights.

I hate passages so much. The bilge pump is still broken, but it wouldn't make any difference if it was working. When we're heeled over for days all the water in the bilge tips over to one side and can't get near the pump. Water starts bubbling up over the edges of the floorboards. And there's a decent amount of it when we're sailing upwind - it creeps in down the mast, through the bow and from who knows where else. But the boat gets pounded and some of that water makes it into the bilge. Is this just a serious design flaw? Is this normal? We heel over and the bilge water never makes it down to the pump. I have no idea what the solution to this is. I don't think there is one. We stay on the same tack for days, sometimes it will be weeks. So we never flatten out and the water never makes it into the bit with the pump. I hate passages.

Our boomvang broke on the way here too. At like 3 am in an erratic sea with waves coming from all directions spraying saltwater over everything. Something on the pulley snapped. We haven't investigated it properly yet, but the boom swung out to the side as we lost control of the mainsheet. Not okay.

I was so proud of how Garth fixed it, and this is a perfect example of why I feel safe sailing into nowhere with this man. He's always fiddling with everything, trying to learn new things. If I leave rope around for him to play with it always gets turned into a monkeys fist, just because he can. We bought some stupidly strong rope to use on the windgen and after using what he needed, my silly husband spent a whole day making little rope things. He was immensely proud of them. I don't even know what they're called, but the rope is spliced back on itself, with a ball on one end and a loop through the rope on the other. The ball goes through the loop and then I think when you put weight on, it works like a shackle.

They were meant to be for rigging up the spinnaker because they're light and strong, which is obviously safer for the kite and it will make us go that tiny bit faster. He'd even attached one to the spinnaker halyard already in the vague hope of some downwind action. So at 3 am when we lost the boomvang, he just went forward and grabbed his little toy off the halyard. Then (attached to the jacklines) he braced himself against the toerail as he reached out into the darkness for the boom, with waves smashing over him. It took a lot of struggling and some quick re rigging with the mainsheet, but he managed to get his little contraption around the boom and just hooked the mainsheet pulley into it. So we didn't have a boomvang, but the mainsheet was working again. He just trimmed the sail and went to bed. 

I have no idea how he thinks of these things. As in my mind actually boggles. I'd forgotten that he'd even made them, the deck was really dangerous with all the waves smashing over it, and it was 3 am, dark and cold. My solution would have been to drop the mainsail until the sun came up. He would have been seriously lucky not to fall over if he'd tried to latch the pulley on with rope - when the mainsheet is gone, the boom just flops around wildly over the water. So it was just a little thing and it didn't take him long, but I know exactly how bad that scenario could have gone... The most likely outcome being him getting smacked in the head as the boom swung around, then carrying him into the water as he held on to it trying to attach the pulley. So I'm really proud of him.

The passage was pretty rough and neither of us was happy. It took four days of me being quite ill before I got my sea legs. So I spent a lot of time either being sick or feeling rotten for taking too many seasickness tablets. And then being sick anyway. Garth was seriously unhappy because we didn't go far enough south at the start of the passage because there were islands in the way, so we had to keep tacking. Then we had to motor the last seven hours into Tonga to make sure we arrived in the morning with plenty of time to get through customs. They don't charge extra to clear in on the weekends here, you just can't do it. So we didn't want to rock up on Friday afternoon to find all the officials too busy to clear us in. We would have spent a long and hungry weekend stuck in quarantine.

Customs were really lovely - one of them was even wearing a grass skirt which was a nice touch. More so because that's just how a lot of people seem to dress rather than him putting it on for show. They're quite conservative here - he was wearing an ankle length sarong-like skirt with the a knee length grass wrap over the top, latched on with a smart looking woven belt. And of course the typical Hawaiian shirt on top.

They didn't want to have anything to do with our fruit and veges, which Garth didn't get a chance to throw out before we arrived. The fridge doesn't have to work as hard when we're offshore because the air outside is a lot cooler, so everything was frozen solid. The biosecurity guy told us to keep them and that they were better on the boat. I told him they were frozen and he was quite insistent that we'd be better off keeping them. They obviously didn't want to have to deal with incinerating anything. They also made sure to mention that it was illegal to bring any of it to shore, so it's lucky we're not staying long! Over the side it goes, as soon as we're away from land. Which I guess is actually a lot easier than them having to go through the proper procedures on shore.

Nothing much else happened. I updated some of the games on my phone with the Internet in Fiji, so I pretty much slept, played on my phone and stared at the horizon. There was a beautiful full moon for our whole trip, making life easier. It looked like something out of a vampire movie for a few days, illuminating the clouds around it and half disappearing behind them every once and a while. It was stupidly bright though, which meant I didn't have to stare at the horizon for quite as long as normal through sleepy eyes. I can't wait until we can just relax without worrying about constant passages. I also can't wait until we're old and rich and sailing really fast downwind on a nice comfy catamaran. I'm so jealous of all these retired biddys lying around on comfy couches, being able to put things down without them tipping over and having enough hot water on board to have water fights in between hour long showers. But I guess while I'm young enough to shave my legs hanging upside down off the back of the boat into the water, we'll stick with what we've got.

Xxx Monique