Thursday 12 October – off to the Ha’apai set of islands

Glad to wake up with no Tsunami disturbing our sleep! We set off at 6am as it is a day sail to Ha’apai, the middle set of Tongan islands, we need to be there before dark as the anchorages have coral bommies that we need to avoid.

Leaving Mounu Island resort at sun rise

The first European to visit Haʻapai was Abel Tasman a Dutch explorer, in 1643. Captain Cook made several stops on some of these islands in 1774 and 1777 and gave them the name of the Friendly Islands in 1777. In 1789, the Haʻapai island group was one of the sites involved in the famous Mutiny on the Bounty, Captain Bligh visited the volcanic island of Tofua shortly after his crew set him adrift following their mutiny.

The underwater volcano where the big eruption occurred in 2022, that caused the 15m tsunami is here in Ha’apai. There is a whole line of volcanic activity the whole way through Tonga to NZ. I hope we are not volcano attractors! We were so close to the one in the Caribbean when the Soufriere Volcano erupted in St Vincent in 2021! We have no happy memories of cleaning the sticky black ash off the boat, which got into every single nook and cranny! We were also visiting San Francisco when the big earthquake hit in 1989. Eeek!

It was a slow 60 mile sail as the wind was mainly in the low teens, we had the engines on quite a bit, so we could get to the anchorage in good light. It was amazing how many reefs and sandbars we had to avoid in the first 15 miles or so, the tell tale sign was huge dumping waves. We had to be much more careful on watch than normal, and I did manage to shout out in the nick of time for Rowan to avoid a fishing buoy. Otherwise it was a slow cloudy passage and we were very happy to see land just after 2pm.

60 miles from the Vava’u islands to the Ha’apai islands, Pangai is the main town. Its interesting to see on the satellite photo the band of shallower water between tht two sets of islands. I love the names, loads of repetition

Waves breaking out in the middle of the sea

We came into the Mushroom anchorage, the first anchorage on our way south, it does not have a good write up about holding but it is easy enough to get into, without too many bommies. There were two other boats already in the anchorage and we squeezed between them as we appeared to be surrounded by coral. Turns out we have met both boats before – Swedish and American boats. It is definitely a bit cooler, I had to have my boat jacket on while anchoring. We were both feeling a little tired, it wasn’t the best night’s sleep last night, so we are very happy to be here for the night, safe and secure.