We sat in the cockpit, morning sun on our backs sipping a cup of tea, it was 9am on Monday 25th July, we were two thirds of the way to Tonga. By the time our cups were empty however, it was 8.10am on Tuesday 26th July, Monday had turned into the day that never was. Tonga may only have a longitude of 174W  but the international date line has been bent around it to keep it in a similar time zone to New Zealand. So we had switched our clocks from -11 UTC Tiahiti time to +13 UTC Togan time. Tomorrow was now today.

A day on we have 260 miles to go and we are pushing hard to try to arrive in Tonga during daylight, it’s on the edge. We have tried to slow Raya down so we arrive the next morning but she is just loving the conditions and even reefed right up we are struggling to get her much below seven knots. With not enough sail to keep her stable in the swell, we were rolling about all over the place. So we now have full sails flying and are trying to keep an average speed as near to eight knots as we can, no mean feat over a few days. We have found an anchorage on the North East of Vava’u Island outside the pass, we should be able to safely slip in there tomorrow evening without having to worrying about the low light and just hope customs don’t discover us anchored without being checked in.

The mismatch in our timings is partly due to having decided, to sadly, give Niue a miss. A weather forecast has gone out for an active trough to go through the Tongan area Sunday/Monday. I’m not precisely sure what an active trough will produce in the way of weather but it sounds like something to avoid, certainly not weather, if can you help it, to be sailing in or moored somewhere as unprotected as Niue. Tonga has a multitude of good anchorages some of which are designated hurricane holes, it feels like the best place to be.

We are finding passage making double handed no problem at all, we are coping with the watch system, as well as we ever do, catching up by napping during the day. The Pacific swell has been generally kind to us with the 2m waves most often behind us and despite frequent showers we have had plenty of sunshine and blue skies. The water temperature has been dropping steadily and is now only 25C, this cools the night air and it has been quite chilly up on deck, trousers, jumpers and even socks have been pulled from the bottom of the wardrobe. On the upside the freezer is at -5C the lowest we’ve seen it for months.

However, Sod’s Law dictates, that we can’t have everything working at once and we have had two equipment failures. On the second day out the generator stopped working, luckily Rick diagnosed the problem quickly, an impeller had gone in the raw water system. A spare was found, put in place, the generator was working again within an hour. The next morning a hose for the hydraulic furlers burst, of course Rick has a spare and again fixed it without any problems. Mopping up the oily fluid covering our decks was another thing altogether. We have done the best we can in a rolly ocean, the rain showers have helped too but there is still a large part of the deck that needs work.
And finally, of course we have to have a passage flying fish story. It’s 5am, Rick is asleep below, the sea is calm, we have risked having the aft cabin hatch open. Suddenly he is awoken by a strange flapping noise, he leaps up to discover a 10inch long, smelly, silver flying fish has dived straight through the hatch and is now sharing his bed.