18:33.8S 174:46.7W 44 miles covered, 382 to go.
We have just left Tonga on our way to Savu Savu in Fiji. The trip from Tonga to Fiji is one of the more complicated because we have to cut through a reef that is 60 miles wide and quite poorly charted, so we have to plan to hit it (not literally) in the early morning so we can be through it by nightfall. You would think that in this day and age we could just have a satellite image overlay on our chart plotter so we could see the shallow water approaching without having to peer off the front of the boat. No such luck, but the World ARC did give us a list of coordinates for 60 uncharted reefs to be avoided. I am not sure whether it is good to know where the 60 uncharted reefs are, or to know that our chart plotter is missing at least 60 reefs. Actually the route we are planning to take is a commonly used and wide passage and I do not think we will find any unexpected obstacles.
Last night we anchored in a bay for one final snorkel in Tonga and Herve invited us onboard Ruby for aperitifs. Herve and Jacques are currently accompanied by their wives, Margaret and Regine and they served us with rose wine from Provence together with pate, dips and sliced truffles (Herve is a truffle grower). Anastasia may be the disco party boat, but Ruby is definitely the gourmet party boat.
Finally, a correction to a previous blog. We received an email from "Rebecca Edwards, Head of Physics, Wells Cathedral School" informing us that the transit of Venus actually happens twice a century and in fact it happened about eight years ago. Thank you, Ms Edwards, for helping us to maintain the accuracy of our blog. And it is obviously good news for all you youngsters at Wells Cathedral School, because if you missed it this time then you might just get to see it in about 92 years.