Blog July 14 - Salt


Salt has been dominating our lives so thought I’d write a piece on this as we have been hanging out at Tongatapu waiting for the right conditions to go back north again, and there’s not much to report.


Our lives are inundated with salt. It has now permeated almost every area of our existence. In Wellington I managed to restrict most of the salt to the outside of the boat but here it has seeped into every crevice. It started on the trip up, day one in fact, when we were in rough weather off the Wairarapa coast. We would fall into our bunks after a watch clothed in full wet weather gear. Getting changed was hard work when the boat is heeled over and falling off waves, and in my case any additional movement below probably meant throwing up.


Salt infiltrates through many means. We only get a fresh water shower once or twice a week as getting fresh water here is quite a challenge, so it comes in on our skin. Plus most days we swim. We wear the same light clothes for days and they become salt laden. Because of the water shortage we can’t do laundry very often and getting the salt out requires several rinses, something we can’t afford.


Then the water got so low we started doing the dishes in salt water. It gets them clean but has introduced salt into many of the cupboards.
Now you may wonder why salt is such a problem. Somewhere a long time ago I gathered a figure about salt being able to absorb 70 times its mass in water. (Someone please Google that for me and let me know if that is correct). These last few days the humidity has been up to 88%. With the air laden with so much water every salty surface is lapping up the fluid and the place has become very damp. Even the bed is damp now as the sheets soon became salt from our salty bodies.
Because our dishes are done in salt water everything you drink has a slight salty flavour. Fortunately we need the ingestion of salt to offset the salt loss from sweating.





Blog July 16, Neiafu, Vavau group


At last we are in the north again. We had a glorious trip up here, aside from having to motor half the trip because of lack of wind. It is 160 miles, an overnight sail from Tongatapu, to here. On the last two trips I was sick on the first day but this time I wasn’t. Having my sea legs makes the trip so much more pleasant.


We are on our way to new adventures. I feel excited and anxious about it. We are headed to two types of places, remote places and foreign ports. Our first stop will be Nuiatoputapu. 160 miles or an overnight sail from here. It only gets a ship four times a year; it won’t have internet and probably not cell phone. We need to take all our own provisions, and it has a very narrow coral reefed entrance. Why go there you may ask? Aside from it being a good stopping point half way to Samoa its very remoteness is part of the attraction.


From there we may go to Samoa. When we first arrived here adapting to being in this very different culture entirely used up the part of my brain that deals with these things and the thought of moving on to a new country quickly (as many yachts do) was daunting. Gradually I have gained a rudimentary understanding of how things work here and am ready for more new experiences. Or so I thought. Yesterday I talked to a man from another yacht about Samoa. He described an awful marina – swell, dirty, noisy, expensive -, the only place you can stay in Apia, main port of Samoa, endless red tape, super – trade winds, and then of course different currency and another language. But after a long description of all the problems he said it was a great place and really worthwhile visiting – see why I’m nervous and excited!


One of the reasons for going to Samoa is so to increase our chances of getting favourable winds for sailing to Niue. Niue is remote and foreign. It has one flight a week. It has no natural harbour so they have put moorings in for yachts. More on Niue later. One country at a time.
David has described our activities with the kids. After they left I was busting to go north but we decided to wait till David’s knee was a bit better. Then we got held up by a long weekend (couldn’t provision) and westerlies. Had a very domestic time, cleaning fixing and rearranging provisions – an almost perpetual task. It was colder down there too. We suffered in about 22 degrees (I don’t expect any sympathy from you down in NZ) and we had to use light blankets at night and wear another layer.


Atata (place of lost dinghy)


We revisited Atata, a short sail from Nukualofa, and anchored off the reef. The kids and I took a long dingy ride into the reef and I took them to a local village. It was very different to anything they had encountered before. For me the villages here are remarkably similar to the villages on Aituatki in the Cook Islands where I worked for 3 months on a film, 30 years ago. Remarkable in that apart from the ubiquitous cell phone tower, they looked much the same as 30 years ago.
We have visited half a dozen now. They don’t usually have power, maybe a small generator here and there and a few solar panels. One village had a communal Sky dish. No cars in the island villages. The houses are very simple, made out of concrete blocks and tin, with louvres. A lot of cooking is done outside on a fire. Dogs, pigs and chickens roam freely.


One of the sad things about these villages in beautiful; settings is the litter. It’s everywhere, people just throw their rubbish on the ground. Beaches and tracks are often festooned with corned beef tins, used batteries and broken glass. In the past all their rubbish would have been organic and not a problem.


As a corollary to my item on salt we have just got our water-maker going. This is making such a difference to our lives. This machine sucks seawater through a membrane and produces 5 litres an hour. We run it every time we run the engine, which we do at least an hour a day to chill our fridge and freezer, and charge our batteries. Also here in Neiafu we have access to local town water which is very unpalatable. I have five buckets of washing soaking in the cockpit waiting for the hose tomorrow where I can rinse to my heart’s content and just for a moment we will be almost salt-free.