We started out with the spinnaker when we dropped the mooring ball--to give the folks on Spruce a show Ben sailed off the mooring ball with the spinnaker in 3 knots of wind. It wasn't a very fast paced show, but it looked pretty cool.
Adventure #1 on passage: sometime during the first night the spinnaker got wrapped around the forestay. Ben can usually fix this with some creative steering but that thing was STUCK. It took hours of steering around crazily to get it to a point where Ben could climb the forestay to unwrap it. That's right, he climbed the forestay. At night. With a wrapped spinnaker.
I didn't start a timer when he went up the forestay but after what seemed like forever of him working on it while gripping the forestay with his legs and one hand, I looked at a clock. Over 30 minutes later, he finally came back to the cockpit completely wiped, but at least the spinnaker was down!
Adventure #2 on passage: at 4:10 p.m. on the second day we were still 160 nm from Tonga, so Ben put up the little working jib to slow us down with the plan of arriving not tomorrow but the next day. When I offhandedly made the comment "you know once you change sail, the wind is going to pick up and we'll make over 7 knots" which really kind of ticked him off...
But sure enough, what happened as soon as the sun went down? Squall city, and with that high wind we were doing 7 knots.
A night of fast sailing meant a day of hard sailing to make it to Tonga before sundown. We might have even turned on the engine just a teensy bit once we were in the bay so we didn't have to anchor after sundown.
Adventure #3 on passage: a whale hit us. We did NOT hit the whale--it hit Kyanos!! We were sailing into Tonga while the sun was almost setting watching humpback whales breach and spout in the distance--absolutely breathtakingly beautiful animals. I was just heading up to the bow to be on whale/reef watch when we felt a WHUMP! that felt like a rogue wave hit the starboard beam. When we turned to look a HUGE tail came up out of the water, slapped the lifelines and topsides, then slammed back down into the water, soaking us. We watched in disbelief as the whale floundered a little at the surface then slid back into the water and was gone.
For a full 5 minutes all we could do was stammer "A whale just hit us. That was a whale." Kyanos didn't seem to be damaged--the bilges weren't running and we couldn't see anything wrong with the hull...
Once we anchored we though about jumping in to check on stuff, but the water wasn't as clear as in Niue and I think I spotted a shark...or some little grey torpedo shaped fish. So we opened a bottle of wine to celebrate another mostly successful passage.
After talking to some folks, we've come up with a few theories about that whale (which we named Frank). We might have gotten too close to a calf and the mom was peeved or it could have been sleeping. I think it was sleeping since it didn't hit us all that hard.
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