0600 position 15-57S 173-46W. At anchor in 32 feet, sand bottom,
Niuatoputapu
My wife, Lori Lloyd, has a unique ability to make the world an extremely
small place. She is unusually friendly with strangers, and it often only
takes about three questions from her to determine that they know someone
in common, are related, or something uncanny like that. I'm not talking
about strangers in Hawaii. I mean strangers sitting next to you on an
airplane between mainland cities. She is also unbelievably supportive of
me and my passions, like sailing. She can't voyage with me due to
seasickness, but spends much of her time while I am away researching the
ports I am visiting and sending information to me by email.
This morning I received an email from Lori containing information about
Niuatoputapu that she had discovered in some cruiser's blog from 2005. It
described a local woman named Sia that had befriended the cruisers, given
them fruit, and hosted them at a Tongan feast. In typical Lori Lloyd type
small world fashion, it turns out that Rocky and I had met Sia yesterday
while in the customs/immigration office paying our fees. She wasn't
working there, just having lunch with someone who did. She offered to
share some of their lunch with us, but they were munching on octopus
tentacles and it didn't look too appetizing, so we politely declined. She
asked us if there was anything we needed, and we mentioned that we were
looking for fruit. She said she might be able to help us, and that we
should monitor channel 16 later to discuss it. She ended up calling us at
4PM, and we made arrangements to meet this morning.
The cruising guides we've read said that the locals prefer goods in trade
rather than money, so I asked Sia if there was anything they needed that
we might have aboard. "Cooking oil and fish hooks", she replied, " or
anything else you can spare." So we went ashore this morning with a two
liter bottle of olive oil and about a dozen fish hooks. That's half of my
olive oil supply, but I can replace it in Vava'u. We met at her house,
which is only a few years old replacing the one that was destroyed by the
2009 tsunami. She gave us some beautiful papaya and some bananas, and we
spoke about their struggles since the tsunami and the coincidence with
Lori's email. She well remembered the folks who wrote about her.
After our visit with Sia, Rocky and I weighed anchor and powered about a
mile to the anchorage just to windward of Hakautu'utu'u Island, an atoll
on the fringing reef outside the harbor. It was a beautiful little island
where we met some locals from Nuku'alofa and Vava'u who were working for
the Red Cross here on Niuatoputapu. We walked around the island and got
in the water but the snorkeling was poor. It was also very windy and a
lee shore, so we didn't stay long powering back to our anchorage off of
town at 2PM. After the hook was down Rocky broke my winning streak at
cribbage. Damn.
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