Position: 19 degrees, 47 minutes south; 174 degrees, 21 minutes west

I thought this was a Wahoo....

...until I saw these teeth.

We had a great overnight sail from the Vava’u Group to the Ha’apai Group. All in Tonga, but Vava’u is the northern set of islands and Ha’apai is the central set. We’re now comfortably anchored in a little bay in Lifuka cooking dinner. Oh, what’s for dinner you ask? We caught a nice barracuda in about 300 feet of water just a few miles off the island group. At first I thought it was a wahoo, but once I gaffed him and pulled him up, I realized those big (huge actually) teeth could belong to only one fish; the barracuda.

Some barracuda harbor ciguatera, so we hailed some local fishermen who came over to look at our catch and they said, “No problem”. They were also very impressed with the size. This is the biggest barracuda I’ve ever seen. About 4 feet long. Even once he was dead, I still used pliers to pull the hook out of his mouth given the set of teeth in there. We’re cooking fillets in chipotle, black bean, corn and butter sauce, all wrapped in foil and baked.

OK, dinner is over and I can say- It. Was. Delicious! Wow, I didn’t know a fish that looks like a barracuda could be so delicious. Hopefully our lips won’t start to go numb and our feet fall off, or whatever the symptoms of ciguatera are. For what it’s worth, we’ve read that only Atlantic barracuda have ciguatera.

Anyway, last night’s sail was delightful. A nice 15 knot breeze on the beam, stars and shooting stars galore. We each got a couple hours of sleep, so we’re not completely trashed today, although right now (at 2100) we’re starting to fade.

A last note on last night’s sail. We staged out of an island that was close to the western side of Vava’u, but we still had to navigate through a couple reefs, miss some rocks and an island that is about 10 mile outside the main group of islands. We had to navigate all that in the dark, since we left at 2300 (or that was the plan anyway). Just before it was time to go, I realized that I hadn’t checked the radar or confirmed that the GPS was accurate in the island group we were staging out of. Dumb! So I fired up the radar expecting to just get confirmation that all was right in the universe. Not. Turns out we had stored some canned powdered milk near the flux-gate compass and gave some away to friends during the day. Oops. The tins were magnetic enough that they influenced the compass. That was fine because we did a magnetic deviation calibration a couple weeks ago. The problem now was that we disturbed the magnetic field by giving away/using some of the tins. The flux-gate compass was flummoxed and so were we. The radar which relies on this digital compass flipped out and was at least 30 degrees off of reality. So, I was left with a disagreement between the radar and GPS. No bueno. I was ready to cancel the night time departure when I realized we had a solid radar hit on a charted object-a lighthouse. So I calibrated the radar on the lighthouse and now we had a picture of what was really out there-and it aligned with the GPS. OK, trip back on. I still have to recalibrate the whole thing now that we’ve moved all the tins, but at least it worked long enough for us to use it for reef avoidance. Yay! Lesson learned? No more metallic objects within 3 feet of the flux-gate compass. Duh.

Back in the States, you watch Stupid Pet Tricks. Out here we have Bob’s Stupid Tonga Tricks.