SV Yohelah – Pacific Loop

We shared a rental car with Marcy & David from Nine of Cups last Thursday for a tour of the “Caves, Caverns & Chasms” of Niue. What amazing sights there are to see here. Because the island is relatively soft limestone, the ocean chews into the cliffs and leaves behind beautiful caves and chasms. There are trails that lead down to the shore from alongside the perimeter road around the island. Some of the trails were 5-10 minute walks, and a few were good hikes through the woods. We spent the entire day making the circuit and visiting all of the sites, which you can see on Rob’s pictures in our photo gallery. Definitely a unique and lovely place to visit. The highlight is a place called Togo (pronounced tongo) Chasm, which is just surreal. You descend down a long ladder to a sandy beach with palm trees that’s at sea level, but is enclosed by towering rock walls. Very strange to hear the ocean roaring just outside the wall you’re standing next to.

Friday morning we finally got in the water with Dive Niue and our pal Neville from Dreamtime for two dives. The first was around the southern end of the island at a site named Gotham City, where there are some sort of batfish we didn’t see. It was a beautiful dive to a dropoff where the wall is covered with healthy and prolific hard corals. The cyclone in 2004 wiped out what little soft corals were here, but the hard corals in some of the bays survived just fine. It was pretty rough getting in with substantial surface chop, but once we descended we found a gorgeous dive site. After that dive we went into another bay further north where the waters were calm and we “swam with dolphins”. We weren’t really swimming, we were hanging on to the side of the dive tender with our faces in the water as she drove slowly behind a big pod. It sounds hokey but it was kinda fun actually. I’ve never seen the dolphins from that view before and it was neat to watch. After our surface interval (required time between dives) we went for our second dive at the site called “Snake Gulley”. This is where the poisonous sea snakes hang out. Don’t know why we had to dive with poisonous things, but apparently they only get aggressive and bite during their mating season, which doesn’t happen to be this week. There were some underwater caverns and caves that we swam through and into, which was also fun and interesting.

We’ve been pondering another dive here in the harbor, but the water temp is too cold to dive without wetsuits. We were going to dive with Dive Niue again yesterday but a substantial southwest swell is running into the bay we would dive in, so all dives were been canceled. Instead, Rob went ashore and get our zarpe. It’s only about 300 miles to Tonga and there are nice light winds forecast for the remainder of this week that we will take advantage of. This stop at Niue has been a highlight of our South Pacific transit and we’re glad we got to spend the time seeing the island and enjoying the hospitality of both the Kiwis and Niueans. Our only disappointment has been that our friends Jeffrey & Nicole from Seattle were supposed to meet us here but it sounds like she’s pretty much chained to her desk at Boeing until the 787 gets in the air, so they had to cancel. Hopefully it’ll work out next time, because this is definitely an island we’d like to visit again.

Today on Yohelah we’re watching the supply ship unload as we prepare to drop our buoy and set sail for the Kingdom of Tonga….

Teresa
Niue is here

Niue has been a rolly anchorage the last few days, as has been the landing at the quay. The swell has been from the south and rolled through the anchorage and onto the wharf. Since there is no harbor here, there is no place to leave even dinghies in the water. Every time we go ashore we raise our dinghy onto the concrete wharf with the provided crane. The last few days, with 4-5 foot waves rolling past the crane and breaking 10 feet away our landings have become the stuff of Olympic legends. Yesterday we decided we’d had enough rolling and checked out, planning on leaving today for Tonga.

At breakfast this morning Niue Radio broadcast a Tsunami alert to all the yachts on anchor. We quickly raised and secured the dinghy, started the engine, and cast off our mooring. We followed Nine of Cups to deeper water, ourselves followed by three other boats. In case you didn’t know, Tsunamis are virtually unfelt by boats in deeper water, it’s only when approaching a shoreline that the wave achieves its potential in height and power. The bottom quickly dropped off to hundreds, and then thousands of feet. Safe once again.

We are now hearing bits and pieces about the earthquake and subsequent tsunamis. With friends on sailboats in both Samoa and American Samoa we are anxiously waiting word on how everyone is doing, and how the local communities are fairing. Tsunamis can travel as fast as 600 miles per our, so American Samoa wouldn’t have had much, if any, warning. On Niue we had twenty minutes of warning, our warning was slow enough that we were actually still on our buoy twenty minutes after the earthquake hit. Whew!

Today on Yohelah we’re happy the tsunami went the other way and praying all is well for our friends in Samoa….

Rob and Teresa

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Miles traveled day 1: 116
Miles let to Vava’u: 134

Today is one of those spectacular days when I love being a sailor. We’ve got 11 knots of wind on our starboard beam, and are flying the full mainsail, jib and staysail. We’re making 6.6 knots in the direction we want to go under clear blue skies. Our friends Neville and Catherine on Dreamtime (a beautiful Cabo Rico 38) passed us last night in very light air on my 11-2:00 watch and had this morning renamed us “Slowhelah”. Since then the wind has come back up this morning, we’ve hoisted our sails up all the way, and we’ve made up over a quarter mile on them in the last 90 minutes.

It’s weird for us being out here with so many sails around us. This is the first time ever on passage we’ve been physically in the company of other boats. Seven of us left Niue yesterday morning and are on the same straight line to Vava’u. When I came off watch at 8:00 this morning I could see two boats directly ahead of me, about 2 and 4 miles away, and one about 2 miles behind me. Right now the one that was behind us is about 1/2 mile abeam – it had been passing until the wind came up and we sped up finally! We’re on track for a late morning arrival into Tonga tomorrow.

Rob and I both have hoped for the last three years to actually get to see a big fish strike our lures. This morning it nearly happened. I was sitting on the toerail behind the helm drinking coffee and I noticed a huge dorado about 20′ off our starboard beam swimming towards our stern. We have two handlines trailing behind us, and it made a beeline for the closest one. Sadly, it took a strike at the lure, passed on it, and swam off. Needless to say, that lure got changed out about 5 minutes later.

As much fun as we’re having sailing today, though, is tempered by the sadness we feel for the folks who were affected by the tsunami and earthquake yesterday. The most tragic story we’ve heard is about Danny from the boat Mainly, who was trying to untie the boat from the dock in Pago Pago when the tsunami wave hit. He was swept off the dock and killed yesterday. We had just finally met Joan and Danny in Bora Bora, after seeing their boat off an on since Ecuador last year. Our hearts go out to Joan as she deals with the unimaginable loss of her cruising partner so far away from home.

OH – FISH ON. Gotta go. Mahi on both lines!!!!

Rats, lost them both. But the funny thing is that Maya knows the sound of getting the gaff and net ready. She came from a dead sleep into the cockpit to help with the catch.

The boat is here