Tonga.

Tuesday 09.09.2014 at 22:50 (LT):

While I was preparing New Dawn for the coming sailing trip to Tonga, I checked the batteries. Unfortunately I found that three of them are bad, with one very bad. This is no good news and I am disappointed – again – with these Vetus batteries. They are all less than one year old. The result is that the 24 V bank can’t keep the Voltage and the fridge and freezer, etc. don’t work once the voltage drop below 24 V. Thus I need to run the generator each  four hours and it seems to get worth.

Kai went for a two hours snorkeling and came back tired and needed a Siesta.

We rigged the spinnaker pool out to port, which was a good move, as the waves and swell was about three meters, which would have made this manoeuvre almost impossible with just two persons. At 17:00 we set sail in a strong E wind of up to 22 kn and set the course for Tonga, about 240 NM away.The wind remained strong all evening and I reefed both sails.

I calculated  we will need about 36 hours to reach Tonga if we would do a conservative 6.5 kn, but so far our average has been well over that, so I suspect we will have to slow down the coming night, to facilitate an arrival at daytime.

An interesting observation, is that we will loose one day, as we come from GMT –11 h in Niue to GMT +13 H in Tonga. We will therefore not arrive Thursday morning 11 September, but Friday morning the 12 September. None of us has birthday on the 11 September, so it is not too important for us!

 New Dawn at the mooring in Neiafu, Vava'u.