We’re finally motoring out of Neiafu harbor and headed toward New Zealand. We’ll set a course for Minerva Reef, but if the weather looks good when we get there, we’ll probably keep going. We are headed out into a front that looks like it will make things rainy and rough for the next day and a half. Normally we’d stay put and wait it out, but the forecast looks like no rough weather on the second half of the way to New Zealand if we leave soon and make good time, so we’ll take some rough weather to start with and just try not to break anything.
I think we’re getting used to being in second and third world situations. I was just noticing yesterday as I was checking out how commonplace the attempt at collecting a bribe as a "fee", barefoot pedestrians, men in pareus, and pigs roaming the yards and streets have become. When we checked out with customs, our information was written in a large, tattered log book that was originally printed as an airport logbook, and from the looks of it, that was sometime in the 1940’s. It was probably part of a foreign aid package. Many of the government and municipal offices have labels of some sort indicating who donated the equipment or funds for construction. Both here and in Niue, many of the desks and computers in the immigration office had big blue EU stickers with a circle of yellow stars. The computers looked new, but the office furniture looked like it was surplus from a couple of decades ago.
Our planned passage time is 10-14 days to cover the approximately 1200 nm, so this will be our longest time out in a while. Hope everyone is doing well back in the states. We’ll keep you posted on the way and hope to have pics of our arrival up in a couple of weeks.