Adventures in No-where...

I generally find leaving places and people quite difficult but, for once, this year´s leaving of Tonga was without emotional friction. Making our way back down through the Ha´apai group and back to Tongatapu allowed me to revisit some of the heart-swelling experiences I had enjoyed on the way up and put a little closure on them perhaps, and anyway, it had been a full, slow season in Tonga with no time spared to fully ´get´ the place. And so it was, with happiness and anticipation filling me, that sailing vessel Local Talent set out from Nuku´alofa bound, not exactly straight for New Zealand, but for another adventure on route, no-where at all...

Minerva Reef is actually not one but two atolls, one almost perfectly round with a single broad, clear pass, and the second shaped like an infinity sign, with a broader but more cluttered pass allowing entry into just one lobe of the double loop. It has no land at all and, despite some minor political scrapping about ownership historically, it belongs to no-one. It is about 2 ½ days sail from Tongatapu for our boat and about a further six days from New Zealand, and it was here, in this human and political no-where, that I spent a couple of weeks regarding the 360deg oceanic horizon from several anchoring spots and finding out just how very much of a real and flourishing place it is for the natural world. (And it is a fair conjecture that this flourishing of nature might well be because it is a human and political no-where, of course.)

I´ll mention it right away: a few weeks before setting sail from Tonga my camera died a final death. This was a blow and means that I have rather few pictures of Minerva except a couple taken on my none-too-good phone and one or two from other people. One day I insisted upon being hoisted up the mast with the ambition of taking some phone pictures to capture the round blueness of South Minerva. These turned out to be woefully inadequate to describe such wonder, but I did get an interesting shot of me at the masthead with a tiny Dean just visible on the foredeck below,

and just one photo that shows, horizon to horizon, the atoll we were in.

How tricky was it to hold onto a slippery phone with no lanyard at all up on the breezy mast!

As usual, the first thing one has to deal with upon arrival in a boat is anchoring. As I´ve said, there is no land behind which to seek shelter at Minerva, only the coral reef. The reef itself is submerged at high tide, meaning that life aboard can get bouncy for these hours as waves come more smartly and with less impediment from the ocean. Fortunately, the reef at North Minerva is somewhat higher. At low water it is possible to paddle and wade out over the reef,

picking your way among the large, brightly-coloured clams embedded there,

and for a while there is even a waterfall of ocean water spilling into the lagoon along its inner edge as the ocean washes over.

In these better protected waters we actually passed some rather rough weather, having to move from one side of the lagoon to the other several times to seek the most shelter. Unfortunately, one morning before the sun was up, but thankfully with a little early light, a catastrophic sound from the bow alerted us to the knowledge that we had been trying to ignore for the latter part of the night: we were on the wrong side of the lagoon as the wind had backed. The noise was our anchor snubber line breaking in two places, sending the snubber fitting itself to the deeps* and sending us scurrying up on deck into the rain and howling wind with foul weather gear over naked bodies to lift the anchor as the bow dipped into the wind-whipped waves. And, yes, the chain was wrapped round a coral head, just to make it more fun!

Advantages, as you already know, of days of such weather conditions and its necessary confinement to the boat are hand-cranking out pasta and spending hours arranging delicious tiny packages of ravioli, which several boats anchored nearby also enjoyed! When one is confined to a boat by weather, making small differences to your day, the sillier the better, can render the time really pleasant and also serve to save the Kindle from meltdown.

However, the weather was far from being all bad. Of the few boats also waiting there for the right weather conditions to go on to NZ, a couple were very good friends with whom we shared lovely social times and, of course, there was the snorkelling!! This was some of the top snorkelling I have ever done, and that is saying a lot. At Minvera, where there is no-one fishing except the odd passing yachtsman twice a year at either end of cyclone season, fish rule. Actually, sharks rule, to be specific. Recognising that I was not one of the scary things floating about, the marine life was very tame toward me and also LARGE! Left to their own devices, species clearly reach a much higher size potential than elsewhere, and so I was able to swim amongst big shoals of the weirdly shaped bump-nosed unicorn fish, garish parrotfish of many kinds, chunky eagle rays with attendant remoras...

it was easy to see fifty species of fish alone in a single dive. Otherwise, lobsters peeked out every few metres from the holes in which they rummaged, octopus slid in their secret ways, extravagant nudibranchs waved their gills here and there... and, basis of it all, of course the coral showed superb diversity and excellent health.

But to get back to the bosses of Minerva... Sharks were everywhere. I saw not a single individual black-tipped reef shark, which is the most common shark that one sees on the reefs in the tropics and is almost perfectly benign; yes, there was no benign shark at all. There were a few white-tipped reef sharks, sleeker and slightly less benign, ok, but there were huge, huge numbers of grey reef sharks, to quite a large size, confident, extremely active, jittery, territorial and aggressive. These are known to be the culprits of the highest number of attacks to divers, gulp! I´ve seen these sharks before of course, but the particular behaviours, numbers and size here were something new. They could be found anywhere but, as one would expect, were more evident in deeper, less enclosed water and in pass areas. And we snorkelled in all these places, numbering at least four people on every dive (except on one occasion) to bolster our presence, and also making a point of holding onto a line attached to the dinghy in particularly sketchy zones. But we learned... Holding onto the dingy line does mean that it is close by, but not that close. Even if you actually had your hands on the dinghy itself and a shark chose to have a chomp, you´d be lucky to have half of yourself out of the water before it reached you; they are fast. One incident, the provocation for which seemed nothing in particular, had a single shark (out of several others present) charging me in just such a situation, but thankfully it was just a warning. Fortunately, for most of our dives we had Alex aboard, who is both confident and experienced with sharks, mainly as a SCUBA diver. He encouraged us very much but, at the end of the day, who can be as confident and experienced as a shark on its own patch? We were all in the water in North Minerva´s pass when the biggest big mama of the tiger sharks came through (about 4m), eyeing us coolly and mooching about, but in the end the tigers made even Alex think twice about getting in. On our very last ´goodbye to all this amazingness´ dive at South Minerva it was overcast and a little chilly and we were all sitting in the dinghy, fully kitted up and fiddling with things, avoiding the plunge. It was an enclosed reef area that we had dived several times before and we were floating a few metres from the reef just where we could follow it past large coral heads, some with caves or tunnels right through them, and then on to a long gully before reaching the shallows which finally drop off to the deeper areas. Finally it was me who dropped in backwards off the boat, aiming to swim under the boat to pick up the reef on the other side, but immediately I saw a tiger shark broadside between me and the reef just a few metres away! So, in one fluid movement I exited the boat on one side and popped up and re-entered it on the other to meet three astonished and questioning faces. Even Alex hesitated before getting in this time. ….........But who could not get in? We did, all of us. This was marine life at its best.

Although happy that the weather conditions farther down our route were keeping us there and exploiting every moment that they were, it was eventually time to concede that our weather window had arrived to depart Minerva. Our passage to New Zealand was straightforward and lovely in itself and Local Talent filled all the paperwork and made the right kind of small-talk with the customs, immigration and biosecurity personnel to enter the country a few of weeks ago and launch into the arrival pleasures of hot showers, laundry and fresh provisions and rejoining the stunning native Kiwi bush.... Bliss!

*This is a metal fitting attached to one or two lines that cleat onto the boat, which one hooks to the anchor chain near to the bow, thereby taking the strain from the anchor itself through the lines rather than leaving it through the chain, with various advantages.

Thanks to Alex for the photo of me swimming with the ray. Here are larger versions of all the pictures in the text and a couple of bonus extras:

BlueClamInTheShallows.NorthMinerva

ArrivingInNewZealandBushAgain

EagleRayLazingWithGailAtSouthMinerva

GailAtMastheadDeanOnForedeck

HorizonToHorizon.SouthMinervaReef

LowTide.NorthMinerva

PanoramaOnTheReef

OnTheReefLookingTowardTheOpenOcean

StandingOnNorthMinervaReefLookingIntoTheLagoon

WaterfallFromTheReefIntoTheLagoon.NorthMinerva