We had a morning of admin, booking and sorting out our trip to South Africa over Christmas. We have all the kids joining us and their partners hopefully, which is so exciting.
The weather evolves, we heard this morning that the boats headed to Minerva reef all turned back, with the new fast developing weather. They are returning to Tonga. Here in the anchorage we are down to 4 boats, the wind blew all day and the water is surprisingly bouncy. We are the only catamaran left. There is now a second cyclone brewing heading closer to NZ! Crazy weather, but we are going to be in the hands of our weather router MetBob and our NZ rally that we have joined.
We will wait here until Monday, when we return to Pangai for good signal for Rowan’s board meeting and to check out of these islands. We then plan to head south to the Tongan main city Nuku’alofa. There we can get diesel and do some provisioning, plus pick up Rowan’s cousin closer to departure time.
We headed to the beach around 5pm as the other boats had collected there, 2 have young kids, and the other Canadian couple are our age. Loads of chat about weather, we are all heading to NZ. At 6:30 pm we headed to Serenity (not Serendipity!) the resort where we booked in for supper. We set our expectations very, very low as the Yogi looking old character who booked us in was so chilled and we had heard the resort was closed. It turns out it is owned by Patti an 80+ year old American lady (well she told us she had a 62 year old daughter, so that is our guess!) and Sammi her yogi Tongan partner. They run it as a yoga well being resort for a max of 28 people, they have been busy all season, but now they are empty, she says nobody comes when the whale season is over. She closed for a few days to recover, which is why we had heard it was closed. But they are open all year and their next guests are in November. We were the only people to eat, the place runs very much off grid, no electric lighting. Sammi cooked swordfish for us which was absolutely deicious in a rich sauce, plus local greens and then two rosti purple potato cakes made with coconut milk/oil, that were the most delicious thing we have had in absolute ages. What a wonderful surprise in this very rustic setting. She was an absolute character and we heard most of her exotic life history! She has published two books, Sammi doesn’t say a lot but looks so chilled he could be horizontal. She was a bit disapproving when he told her at the end of the meal he was joining a friend for some Kava (a mild hallucinogenic drink)! This friend appeared from nowhere in the pitch dark, maybe he was the person in the Robinson Crusoe tent we saw yesteday on the other side. She also managed to produce a delicious bottle of wine. We felt very spoilt and were delighted with our night out. It was quite adventurous heading home in the dark we had left JeldiJeldi out in the water quite far up the beach. The tide had come up and we were relieved when we finally spotted her. Rowan had to swim out and get her, a good excuse for a skinny dip, although the water is getting a lot colder.
Kitchen in the back of the dining room
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