The Company of Tasmanians

Two days ago I rowed back to Galactic from a frustrating session of trying to handle work and other various chores on a slow internet cafe connection to find a familiar face in an unexpected place - our Tasmanian friend Karen Westwood grinning at me from the cockpit and wearing a very un-Tasmanian sarong over her swimmers. Karen and her friend Annette are on a Tongan holiday and, knowing that we were somewhere in the kingdom, took a chance and had their whale-watching boat hail us on the VHF. And, it just happened that it was our day in Neiafu for internet and beer and mailing homeschool materials back to Tasmania, and we were only a couple hundred meters away in the harbor.

So our plans to zoom out back to an anchorage out of town turned into a fun night of hanging out and having dinner on board Galactic with Karen and Annette and the delightful crew of Wooshie, whom we had just met a few days before and had fortuitously anchored next to us. Neiafu is one of the great harbors of the South Pacific, and we had a feed and a chat and a couple of drinks under the deck awning with the low lights of the waterfront fringed around us, the flying foxes flapping overhead, and the nearly-full moon poking out through the heavy tropical clouds...