September 2014

Hello everyone,

I was almost in time for my September letter, but when I reached the anchorage off the island of Niue, I found excellent Wi-Fi networks accessible from the boat... but they requested a login and password that could not be purchased by credit card, only going ashore ... and on August 31, a Sunday, in Niue, as in the Cook Islands, on Sundays everything stops, except churches and temples.

For those who do not know where is Aitutaki, my last stop, nor Niue : 19 degrees south, just east of the international date line, which had a hiccup here: the people of Tonga, my next stop, who didn't relish being the last country to see the sunrise or the new year, requested that this very official line be shifted ; as a result, instead of being eleven hours behind Greenwich time, they are thirteen hours ahead: between Niue and Tonga, they will still one day from me, that will be given back to me only when I return to Polynesia.

So I passed the point of no return: last year, I had sailed to the Cook islands with my son Manea, planning to continue westward, when a beautiful and rare window of westerly winds convinced me to return to Polynesia, a place definitely hard to leave; this time, I experienced no doubts, a tough southeast wind took me westward ; towards Fiji, New Zealand, Australia...We'll see.

A hefty wind which has also opened a 3 foot cut in my genoa; I've noticed in in time (I could see the moon through!) and I rolled two-thirds of it to avoid tearing the rest, but I still sailed fast, driven by the maraamu, and riding waves 3 m high and more on this deserted ocean.

Here, in the lee of Niue island, the sea is calm; a colleague sailor has stitched my genoa with the machine he's got on board his catamaran, and I'm ready to sail on, tomorrow, for Tonga.

In the meantime I've taken a little tour of Niue, locally nicknamed "The Rock": it's actually a raised atoll, a makatea, surrounded by cliffs pierced by a thousand caves, Niue has almost no beach except in a few tiny coves, and a coral reef surrounds the island, but it encloses no lagoon. When you land on Niue's wharf, you must at once lift your dinghy with an electric crane available there; although not as spectacular as St. Helena (which, by comparison, looks like a piece the Grand Canyon lost in the South Atlantic), Niue reminds me a little of that island.

One thousand inhabitants live here a peaceful life in a beautiful and well maintained island, but 20000 more Niue citizens live abroad, in particular in New Zealand.