Day 381, Year 1: Weather, Weather, Weather
Date: Friday, November 3, 2006
Weather: Partly Sunny and Very Windy
Location: Pangaimotu Island, Tongatapu Group, Tonga
The saga continues. All anyone can talk about is the weather and right now it is not cooperating. There is another tropical depression in the upper Southwest Pacific and could actually develop into the second cyclone/hurricane of the season. It is windy, windy, windy here. Thank goodness we are in a very protected anchorage. Just outside the anchorage there are white caps, but it is calm here behind the island of Pangaimotu.
On this morning’s Coconut Net, boats in this part of the world heading to New Zealand were asked to check in and give their departure date. There must have been about 30 boats saying that they were leaving here on November 7. Looks like we will have quite a flotilla. We took the Pangaimotu Resort ferry into Nuku’alofa today to extend our Visas. We will have been here in Tonga for 30 days on Sunday, and even though we will check out early next week, we felt that we needed to be legal. Besides, it gave us an excuse to meet the brother of Nia who emailed us from American Samoa last week. Nia’s full name is Lavinia Langi-Sefuiva. We thought she was a he until we received a second enail. Sorry Nia. She wrote to tell us her brother works at Immigration here and today we got to meet him. We love these connections.
Sylvie of Windcastle went into town with us today, and we had a great time shopping and celebrating the day. We spent the evening at the Pangaimotu Resort in the company of other cruisers. Tomorrow we plan to clean the bottom of the boat AGAIN. That will give us an excuse to be in the water much of the day. I look forward to that.
061103 Day 381 Tonga, Pangaimotu Island–Big Mama |