On this mornings net we heard about a Tongan ferry that had sunk overnight just north of the capital. There were still looking for about half of the 80 people on board. The ferry goes between the capital and the island groups and comes up to this area so many of the locals know people on board.
We had a sort out and took some spare food and rope over to the people at the Art Galley in exchange for a small painting.
We decided to head through one of the reef passes to explore some of the more remote anchorages. We had been warn that the charts were out and planned to eye ball navigate but set the tracker on our chart plotter to see where we had gone to assess the accuracy of our charts. When we got to the pass it was abit choppy and the small marker balls were hard to see so Jonny took the dinghy to check it out whilst i hovered at the edge of the reef and then we took Newt through. Looking at our path afterwards our Navionics Gold charts were spot on (although we have heard that the sea map and max sea charts arent).
We checked out a couple of anchorages but there were quite exposed and eventually ended up in the old harbour which was really protected with 2 other boats.
Throughout the afternoon we listened to the VHF as a rescue party was organised to head south to help with the ferry rescue. Unfortunately (or maybe it was for the best??) we were too far from town to offer our assistance - after over 12 hours in the water there are unlikely to be many more survivors so not going to be an easy rescue mission.
We had a peaceful afternoon and evening enjoying our tranquil anchorage ... with a naked single handed guy drinking beer and singing on the boat next to us!!
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