We’re a day ahead of the US, so today is your tomorrow.

Anyway, last night (which was your tonight, er, I think) was another fairly sleepless night. Not as eventful as the night before, but heavy, heavy rain kept waking me up and I’d hear a wind gust and jump up to make sure we weren’t going to get hit by the boat upwind. We heard a great term for certain boats that come into an anchorage that you just know are going to cause a problem with their boat handling. “Whiskey Bravo”. This is the phonetic for “WB”, which in term are the initials for “Wide Berth”. In other words there are some folks that when you see them you just head the other way because you KNOW they aren’t going to handle their boat or anchor well. Last night we had a Whiskey Bravo anchor directly upwind. I should have just moved, but it was late when they got in, I had dove our own anchor and was positive it was well secured, etc, etc. But…by not just moving, I was up all night worrying instead. They were actually directly upwind of our friends on Adventure Bound and anchored barely one boat length upwind of them so they were most at risk, but we were the next in line if they broke lose. Ultimately nothing happened, but we’ve seen enough to know it can, and when it does there can be some significant damage. So, look out for the Whiskey Bravos!

We left Ano Bay today to start exploring the Tonga Archipelago. There are so many lovely little islands to explore, we’re going to take a few weeks and just move from one to the next, snorkeling, hiking, tide-pooling and just generally getting to know this area. We have about a month until we need to leave for New Zealand, so we’re going to make the best of it.

We left our anchorage right about 1200 and headed for the Eastern Islands, which are the hardest to get to. There are some gnarly reefs you have to thread your way through to get over here. Fortunately we had some GPS coordinates from another cruiser who we trust, so I put those into a GPS Route Plan and off we went. Even though we had the route, it was a little hair-raising. You never know absolutely for sure if the coordinates are accurate, so you’re using them plus navigating visually-and by visually, I mean, you can see the water change color right in front of you from “deep” color to “shallow” color and you can see exposed reef on either side where the jagged coral sticks out of the water. By “deep” and “shallow” colors, I mean blue and turquoise, but these are blunt navigation tools. When does “turquoise” become too shallow? It’s a constant judgment call and we went realllllly slow through the shallow spots.

But we made it and we’re now at a spot that is affectionately called #28. It’s funny, but that’s how the charts mark the islands around here. At first it seems impersonal, but after a while you get used to it and it’s easy to tell people where you are. “Number 27”. Much easier to say than; “Kakautaumai”, for instance. Actually in our case, right now we’re in “Ofu”, so that’s not so hard to say.

It’s still cloudy, but has stopped raining for the first time in two days, so that’s progress. It’s supposed to be nice for a couple days before another front rolls through bringing more rain and wind. So, we’ll look to spend a few days exploring and then find a solid place to hunker down for the next storm episode. Hopefully without any Whiskey Bravos nearby.