We recently finished the passage between Rarotonga in the Cook Islands and Vava’u in Tonga. They call this stretch The Dangerous Middle. The weather is unpredictable and you could go to sleep in flat calm seas and wake up to a wave that rolls you to the other side of the bed and tilts the boat onto a 45 degree angle. Seven days of this. The Pacific crossing was bliss compared to this one. Horrible, with a capital ‘H’.
Along with the sea state came the complete restlessness. I don’t know why, but unlike the other passages, we were all going out of our minds. We played all the card games we knew, countless games of Mexican Train, and read so much that the words got blurry (literally). We even cracked open our card game book for the first time and learned that the English is completely unreadable.
The one interesting part of the journey was crossing the International Date Line. Our weekend got condensed down to one day because Sunday started at 6:00. Because Harrison and I split our dish-washing chores between breakfast/lunch and dinner, Harrison was on dishes all day!
Now that we’ve arrived safely in Tonga, the passage was all worth it. The dark waters and cloudy skies may sound depressing, but against the bright green landscape, it all looks gorgeous.
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