June 29 To July 3, 2018
“Vacation?! Your lives are a vacation!”
Yes, I agree, but still, it was really nice to have a little four day holiday after a six and a half day ocean passage to Minerva on the way from New Zealand to Fiji.
While it hadn’t been a bad passage (but not easy either), it was sure a relief to drop the anchor and get some good sleep. There were eight to ten boats at anchor here and kind of a festive atmosphere with spontaneous gatherings on the reef at low tide.
By the way, the shots above and the underwater video below were taken with our new Yi Lite action camera. The Yi replaced our really bad, early version GoPro and this was our first chance to try out this $100 miracle. I’m impressed. If this is the cheap version, I wonder what its big brother can do!
This was our second stop at Minerva but our first time on the reef and our first time snorkeling here.
The snorkeling was really pretty good. There were interesting fish and interesting rock formations in the very shallow area just inside the reef, but it was cold! I froze both in the water and out. I don’t think we’ve ever experienced air temperatures so low while being this close to the tropics (only 10 mile south of the Tropic of Capricorn). There was even a night when I had to turn on the diesel cabin heater and most of our blankets where used every night.
Minerva awed us again with its strange beauty. The color of the water was unnatural with bright, glowing cyan and blue. The sky had an almost constant parade of squalls marching by just outside the reef. Rainbows were the norm and for the first time, we saw one come down below the horizon.
So what do you do on vacations at Minerva? Fix boats, of course.
Our friends on Kozmo were here with us and I worked on their autopilot. The patient pulled through and they are taking a break from the hand steering they did on the way to Minerva.
It’s funny. Last time we were here, I spent a day working on another friend’s boat. They got their main sail jammed in their in-boom roller furling and about ten of us from the anchorage tried, without success, to free it.
As for Legacy’s passage repairs, I got them done the night before we arrived at Minerva. Our engine alternator was not charging and we found, after removing the hot alternator, that a wire had pulled out of a crimp connector. It was so good to have both an extra voltage regulator aboard (I tried swapping that before I found the real problem) and an extra alternator (I was in the process of swapping alternators when I found the bad connection).
We’re underway as I write this and hope to arrive in Fiji in two more days. It’s starting to get a little warmer and it’s been a pretty good passage, but rolly. It’ll be good to get to Savusavu for another vacation! -Rich and Cyndi
Comment From Cyndi: I think I need to weigh on this “vacation” stuff, maybe by pointing out that “vacation” means different things to different people. When hearing about our lifestyle, some people do get the idea that we live on some sort of never-ending vacation. From my viewpoint, this is nowhere near the truth. I would call it more of a vagabond lifestyle. We do get to travel and experience some amazing things, and our lives include a lot of novelty. One of the best parts is that we stay in areas long enough to feel at home in many of the places we visit.
But it’s because we often function in a normal daily sort of lifestyle that we do feel at home. We cook, go grocery shopping, do or have laundry done, figure out how to get around (walk, bus, commuter train, taxi, car rental, car ownership, etc.) We find low-cost eateries where we can go frequently, are out and about running endless errands often enough to get to know the business proprietors, and of course we do normal housekeeping and chores. Our home is small but high maintenance and requires regular grunt work to keep it up and running. Much of our bathroom time is spent in public toilets and showers (although with our new heater we do get more showers on the boat), and forget ever seeing a bathtub.
Let me compare this with what, to me, is a vacation. A vacation is going to place where one has no cooking, laundry or cleaning to do. Instead a maid cleans daily, the sheets are changed, and all meals are prepared without any planning, shopping or cooking on our part (this is why I really hate the idea of hotels with kitchenettes—they represent the antithesis of a vacation). A vacation also involves no home maintenance—leaking ceilings, plumbing issues, weather damage, etc., are the problem of the hotel owner. With an ideal vacation, there’s a combination of enough interesting places to visit, generally via rental car, balanced with time to just relax, preferably by sitting on a beach, in a forest, etc., and play, maybe trying a new activity like paddle boarding, kite surfing, kayaking, jet skiing, etc. This would be followed by a late afternoon shower in the freshly-cleaned room, then a nice dinner out. A vacation is a time-out from the work of real life. Cruising is a fantastic way to travel, but since we bring our home (and all its issues) with us everywhere we go and have to take a lot of care when moving that home from place to place, I wouldn’t classify it as a vacation.
And yes, Minerva was a time-out of sorts, but we weren’t really on vacation so much as getting a rest during a long and sometimes difficult journey. While taking this break, we waited for an acceptable weather window (not having the time or supplies to wait for a perfect window) to head back out onto the open ocean where once again we’d be short on sleep and spend lots of time getting ping-ponged around a moving boat. No one who’s ever had to cook a meal on the endlessly (and often unpredictably) moving platform of a rough ocean or struggled to stay awake on watch would consider a passage a vacation. It’s more an ordeal to be endured so we can get to some fantastic areas of the world and experience life there, but not without more ordeals that if we’re lucky, will be brief and minor once we’re there.
Comment from Rich: Well, I guess I really stepped in it there! It seems someone aboard Legacy might need a little hotel time. Hey, you know what they call a cruiser that doesn’t give their partner enough of what they need? A single hander! No thank you – I don’t want to sail alone. Motel 6, here we come!
Comment from Cyndi: OK, I guess I’ve gotten a somewhat negative here, because in the end, cruising has so many fantastic moments that it makes enduring the hard stuff worth it, and there are even some wonderful days on passages. I suppose I feel that when people get the impression our lives are one big box of fluffy bunnies, I have to set the record straight. And do note the comment Rich made about Motel 6 as much of the time when we do take road trips (we try to see places both by sea and by land), they involve making a plan first as to what we want to see, then doing it in the shortest amount of time possible, often while staying at budget hotels (often with kitchenettes that I try to ignore except for the coffee cups and wine glasses).
More about Minerva Reef
Here’s what Minerva looks like on Google satellite images in this interactive Google map below…
Note that South Minerva isn’t even on Google Satellite images and after looking at all the satellite image sources I use, I couldn’t find either Minerva on any of them. Google is it, and only for North Minerva.
The waypoints we use to get in are from the Soggy Paws Tonga compendium located here. They’ve been spot on for us. We anchor as close to the reef as possible and still allow a full 360° swing in the event of squalls. (On the inside of the reef, obviously.) You can anchor just about anywhere to allow for the wind direction. We usually anchor in about 40 to 50′ of water.
The shallowest we’ve seen in the entrance into the pass is 40′. The center of the reef is pretty deep – about 80′ in most places and we’ve never seen bombies or mounts, even running through here with forward scan this season.
It’s anyone’s guess as to the tide times here and we’ve never paid much attention to tides (except for waiting for low tide for our reef walk). The current is almost always running out of the pass as the waves push water into the lagoon. The most current we’ve ever hear of is 3 knots and we can motor against that. Strong wind against current in the pass entrance could be a problem.
Also of note, Navionics charts seem to be very accurate for North Minerva. (Don’t know about South Minerva – never been there.)
