Position: 18 degrees, 43 minutes south; 174 degrees, 05 minutes west

We got to the island for the feast and first thing, they gave us leis. Nice touch.

As we wondered around the island we found the men cooking the pigs

...and in many of the houses the women were making the side dishes.

We weren't disappointed. The food was pretty yummy.

We had to do one more feast. After going to feasts several places in the Marquesas, we were pretty much feasted out for a while. However, here in Tonga they do them a little differently and the one on Lape Island is known as a good one, so we decided to go.

Yesterday we moved from Kenutu, which is an uninhabited island on the eastern stretch of Vava’u. In fact, when we hiked across the island (not much more than ¼ mile) we came to cliffs overlooking the ocean-it’s so far east there’s no more Tonga, just ocean stretching back to where we had come over this past year. Once we got the anchor up, we threaded out way back through the reefs that make Kenutu less visited than a lot of the other islands in the Vava’u group. It’s a little tricky getting there and many just don’t want to have that much “adventure”. Our decision to anchor in the middle of the pass when the visibility dropped in the squall was reinforced when we saw on the way back out the number of reefs that were right in the area where we stopped. Had we kept going we would have surely hit one-they are just not visible without a little sunlight.

After threading the reefs, we set a route through the island chain over to the west side of the group to an island called Vaka’eitu, which is where we’re now anchored. It’s about ½ mile from Lape Island where the feast was, so with our friends on Orcinius, we dinghied over. We weren’t disappointed. As this is getting toward the end of the cruising season, something like 65 people showed up from around the neighboring anchorages. Lape is very small and they only have 26 people who live on the island (half of those are children), so you might imagine they were working hard to feed that many. But they did a good job. Before the feast we walked through the village and found one group of men tending the pigs which were spit-roasting over an open fire. Further on we came to a house where the women in it were sitting on the floor (Tongans don’t use much furniture) making many of the side dishes which were too numerous to mention, but delicious.

You might wonder about doing the dishes for such a large feast. Aside from the forks that they fortunately provided, the dishes were each hand-carved out of a banana stalk. Yes, one of men was sitting under a tree with a machete and a knife. He was slashing the banana trunk into 14 inch long sections. Each section then “broke” into half cylinder shaped sections about ½ inch thick and 5 inches across, which were the basis of the plate. Then he took his knife and decorated the edges with a serrated look. A lot of work for dishes that were only going to be used once and then burned or possibly fed to the goats and pigs. The Tongans are very good about using everything since most of them who live on the islands away from the main towns, live off the land and don’t have jobs.

Anyway, a good feast and a good gathering of folks, many of whom have become our friends as we have crossed paths along the way for these past thousands of miles of ocean.

Today also brought some sunshine, so we went snorkeling. Near here there is a spot called Coral Gardens. It’s a long reef with waves breaking on it, but outside the break it drops off to a magnificent reef “garden”. The coral is so colorful and varied that’s really what it looks like. A little tenuous getting across the reef into the deeper water-you go at high tide, but even then the water is very shallow where the waves break and the coral underneath is very sharp. You only have about 10 inches of clearance through a stretch of about 30 yards. The solution is to wait for a lull in the waves and then swim fast. We heard of a couple people yesterday who were bloodied in the process, so we were not taking it for granted. A beautiful swim. Lots of fish, lots of color and the water dropped off deeply giving an eerie blue abyss kind of glow.

A snorkel, a feast and oh yeah, I got to spend an hour or so in the hammock up on the foredeck. What more can you ask for. A haircut you say. Yup, got that too. Thanks Ann!