Last day in Ha’apai

Our morning started with our new Tongan friend showing up in his dugout canoe offering us a couple of octopii. We knew he needed a razor so we had four we didn’t want and some shaving foam we didn’t like the smell of. Along with a couple of tins of vanilla flavoured rice pudding we had a trade as well as thanks for our tour of the island.

The octopus were quite fascinating as their skin was still changing colour and their suckers, out of reflex, would still cling on to things. Our friend showed us how to turn the octopi inside out and to remove the guts. The guts make good fishing bait so we let him have these pieces as this was his livelihood.

Ben and I chopped the octopi up into pieces and Helen put the tougher parts of the tentacles into the pressure cooker to soften up.

Around 10:30 Frank from Tahina came over and we all dove the reef. We explored the caves some more, sometimes going in. We also explored the wreck of La Tortue being able to get inside that too. I found a fishing reel under the wreck which I kept and later cleaned up. If we meet Marie or Nicolas I’ll give it to them, otherwise it’s my salvage booty.

For lunch we battered and fried the octopus pieces. The novelty soon wore off and we ended up eating the batter leaving most of the octopus which ended up in the sea. I thought the pressure cooked octopus tasted like corned beef.

In the afternoon Ben and I finished off cleaning the hulls before putting all the hookah and dive gear away ready for today’s passage.

I found it hard to sleep last night so I spent a lot of time organizing my ebooks.

We set off early this morning. We motored out of the reef and put the sails up. A new problem. We noticed a small tear in the head sail, no doubt from the bashing to wind we’d been recently doing. A quick discussing about the pros and cons led us to decide to pull in the head sail and press on. We couldn’t lower the head sail to repair it on passage and going back to the anchorage would cost us a day and I didn’t like the forecast for tomorrow.

So here we are alternately sailing, motor sailing, sometimes with the genset on, sometimes running on batteries. Our ETA is late this afternoon as we don’t have the speed we would like but enough to get there in good time.