Thursday 23rd August

Rarotonga,
Cook Islands

21 12.295 S
159 47.091 W

Well as you can see from the Long and Lat at the beginning of today’s blog we haven’t gone anywhere. We started the day off with purpose – we were going to leave, we took the trash ashore, tidied away all the things that move in transit and began our preparations for leaving. Meanwhile Gerry had wandered along the dock to chat to a new arrival who came in last night from Bora Bora; when he returned to our boat Abigail and I had just about got everything ready to leave when Gerry said that he thought we might not be going. The new arrivals told us that they had a weather report showing a severe gale blowing our way out from New Zealand and that the marine warnings were for all boats to be into Niue and anchored by Saturday at the latest. Gerry was immediately on the internet looking for more details and information as none of our rib charts had shown anything of the kind. Sure enough with enough hunting we found the rogue gale – it was part of the southern convergence zone stuff which happens out of the south (duh!) and can have winds reaching 70 knots - we didn’t want to be out in that so our departure was postponed for the time being. It appears that the front is supposed to hit Niue on the weekend and then who knows! We are a little concerned for Osprey who left yesterday and aren’t particularly fast, we aren’t sure that they will make it into the safe harbour before being hit by the storm. Anyway once we had decided to stay put we did a whole lot of nothing; wandering ashore for a coffee, read our books and took naps when we felt the need. We rearranged Abigail’s flight out of Tonga for a week later, though even this may need revising if the weather is slow to improve. As we have already spent a small fortune here on eating ashore and stocking up we decided to eat on the boat and I cooked up one of our favourite dinners – Miracle Whip chicken which disappeared in one easy go. Having been stuck doing nothing all day we opted to watch a movie after dinner – for the millionth time we Gerry and sat through Shrek 2 as Abigail had never seen it. For some reason it always makes us laugh, especially donkey asking “are we there yet” – it’s just like being on our boat! Once the movie was over it was time to try and decided on a plan for the next couple of days which we will spend here waiting for decent weather and then we were all off to bed.