We are still in Tonga and plan to be here for another month or so until the weather for the passage to NZ comes good. Not a bad place to hang out. Lovely people, super-clear water, wonderful places to visit.
We spent the morning scrubbing the boat’s bottom because the Kiwi’s insist on nothing less than perfection when they do their arrival biosecurity check. I think we will be scrubbing very regularly over the next month. It’s not the easiest job in the world as our keel is 2.3 metres deep but, fortunately, we have a Nemo surface air pump so I can scrub away underwater for an hour without becoming too hypoxic.
We had a significant technical challenge when 4 out of our 5 main isolator switches failed suddenly and without provocation. With the switches gone we couldn’t get power to most of our critical equipment so a hasty return to port in search of spares and someone more electrically minded than me. Michael and Anne on Nimue reserved us a mooring and ushered us onto it as anchoring is out of the question without the power to lift a 45kg anchor. Michael then turned up the next morning and confessed that he had been an electrician in a former life and it wasn’t long before we understood what had happened. Each of the four failed BEP switches have 4 plastic tabs that hold the switch together and I now know, courtesy of YouTube, that the plastic tabs become brittle and fail with age. When this happens the switch literally falls apart and the copper connector drops into the bilge rendering the switch permanently off. Michael beavered away for a couple of hours, re-jigged our electrical design and restored power to windlass, winches, fridge, freezer, our 12 volt instruments and the engine. The only thing that we didn’t lose was our internet connection and our ability to surf our way to a solution. Thank you Michael!
A short walk this afternoon took us to the idyllic Austrian run Reef Lodge Resort where we celebrated a successful morning of scrubbing with a Pina Colada each. The cocktail had rather more alcohol in than we are accustomed to (which is not much)! Anyway, we wobbled back to the boat without mishap where will revert to alcohol abstinence.
