Good morning

This morning view from the bed surely beats staring at the mouldy roof of the tent.

 

We still need to widen the gap to get the full view.

Moving Day

We've mostly got the roof on now so today we knocked together some stairs that Spy can climb and made the move. OK, so most of the front wall is missing, there is no door, verandah, or power. There is still three windows to cut out and most of the floor boards are just sitting in place to dry but this is much better than spending another night in the mouldy tent.

Spy vs. crab

Coconut crab

And he's still digging. I saw the crab run away ages ago.

 

Hip rafters

We've made some forward progress and some backward. We put about a third of the floor down but then pulled it back up again when we found how much damage the sun was doing to it. Turns out there's a good reason you should put the roof on before the floorboards. We also put one wall and a window on, but most importantly we got the hip rafters up and one of the coconut crossbeams. The other crossbeam is too heavy to lift right now because it was only cut about four weeks ago and is still very green so we'll put that in later on.

 

Next we will do the other, jack rafters, that go between these hip rafters, then cut things to length. The roof overhang will only be 300mm due to hurricanes.

We've also towed the roof battens out to the island now so just the roofing iron to go. That'll require a trip on the raft.

I lost my phone in town when I lay down to poke my hernia back in but luckily a kind soul dropped it in to the police station. I paid a $50 reward for it which I hope actually went to the finder and not the cop beer fund, but then a couple of days later took it for a swim so now I have no phone :-(

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Floor has landed

We towed the floorboards out to the island today.

 

Spy decided we'd made him a jetty to spy on the fish from. At that moment there were two big tuna swimming along the beach.

Should get the floor down in the next few days. There is still a little bit of framing work to finish off first.

Rugby and joists

On Friday Tongans were out in force to support their team, wearing their colours and driving around honking horns.

I'm almost glad the team lost because town would have been shut down for days of celebration.

We got the floor joists on today and are just starting to tie and bolt things down.


 

We need to haul floor boards over to the island but the winds have been too strong for the last week and it looks like they will continue for another week until we get a break so it might be another quiet week on the island.

Hut posts done

It's been a fairly slow couple of weeks but today we finally got the last of the hut posts concreted in, the bearers on and the outer two floor joists in place. Work has been slowed by the need to get aggregate, cement, etc. over to the island but also because I've gone and given myself a hernia, leaving Mandy to do more than her fair share of the work. We're yet to come up with a plan to manage that but the hospital in Nuku'alofa is pretty good so I guess I'm going to have to take a few weeks off to get surgery. That will put us well into the rainy season and the tent is already showing signs of rot and mould.

We also cut down a couple of Fijian kauri trees that the neighbour said we could thin from his plot to make some posts for the verandah. We got three 3m posts out of each tree. We had to float them round from the other side of the island. A fun fact is that the bottom half of a freshly cut kauri tree doesn't float, so that was a bit of a surprise.  However with the top half tied in as well they were roughly neutrally bouyant so only needed a little encouragement to walk them round the island. We still need to get more aggregate and cement over for those but they can wait a while to dry.

Visa

We finally got our Visas today. We applied for our Visas in March so this is about normal we're told.

First post

Lovely day in paradise today. This is the eastern beach.

 

So no, of course I don't mean my first post to the blog, but we did concrete the first house corner post in today. We weren't able to lift the post into the hole so used a kind of gin pole arrangement.

We formed a cross using two 150x50 (6x2") timbers tied with rope in the center and bottom and were able to fairly easily lift the post using the long tail of the cross for leverage and prop it up.

Then using a hand-crank boat trailer winch we pulled the cross forward, lifting the post upwards.

And with a little assistance from the crowbar dropped it into the hole.

We bought some aggregate on the mainland at TOP$10 per sack. It's crushed coral rock, which is of course limestone, except quite a bit harder than what we're used to in NZ. It took a couple of dinghy trips to bring 3 sacks and a bag of cement over to the island. We bulked it up 50/50 with sand we collected from about 20 meters in from the high tide line so it wasn't salty, and chucked in a quite a few coral rocks to bulk it up a bit more. It took a good chunk of the day to collect rocks, sand, water from the well and get the post raised, braced and concreted but getting the first corner pole in made for a good day.

Don't forget the camera

I remembered this time. This is the coral about 400 m southeast of the house.

Broken ground

Today we dropped the last of the large trees that would pose a risk to the hut (except for a couple of smallish coconut trees)

 

We also pegged out the hut corners and broke ground on the first of the pole foundations

 

We hit old coral rock at 950mm, which is fine because I only wanted the holes to be 900mm. However, this hole was the farthest from the waterfront so we might not make the full 900 on the closer ones. The holes are 400mm wide and the poles are 200mm wide. It was fairly easy digging in gluggy red clay.

Loo revisited

Yesterday Mandy wove a roof for the outhouse so we have privacy and some limited shelter from the rain. Most importantly it's stopped all the leaves, seeds and fruit falling on the seat, which were making some nasty looking stains.

 

The walls of the outhouse are just the packing boxes I made to safely transport the solar panels. The plan is that if/when we get a big hurricane looming I'll pack the panels up in these boxes again to increase their chance of survival. I will slightly bury the box and put some logs in top.

Not much progress otherwise though. I've cleared a new garden site near the well and planted some more papaya. My back is playing up so we've not got much done on the house site recently.

Today it's bucketing down with rain and we're getting a bit of thunder and lightning. The rain barrels are topped up again so at least we have plenty of water.

Bananas

Mostly for my own record, we planted some banana palms yesterday - three lady-finger and three  "normal" palms.

 

Clearing continues

Today I cleared the flat section on the eastern beach. It was a mix of some sort of stalky grass and weeds so I hope the grass will become tame. It will make a nice spot for a picnic table. A year or so ago when we were scoping out the block I planted papaya seeds all over the place just in case we came here. The spindly papaya you can see are probably those but they are not doing very well, and I haven't found any others that survived unattended.

Other than that, clearing of the house site goes on. It's just a daily job of cutting a tree or two down, chopping them up into firewood sized chunks so it will burn green and burning it for a couple of days. About one more week, maybe two and we should be ready to start digging holes for the corner poles.

 

The guttering finally arrived so we put that up but there were no joiners and nobody had thought to order any so it will be a few months before we can get one of those. In the meantime duct tape will have to do.  It looks like we might get some rain on Saturday so we've just rigged up a hoki downpipe for now so at least we can get some water (there are always plenty of bottles washing up on the beach because rubbish bins are not customary tools here). We might get a fresh water shower this weekend, all being well!

Sun

Today I happened to be round for the sunrise and sunset. Nothing spectacular today but just showing the views from the eastern beach for the sunrise and from the house site for the sunset.

 

 

Otherwise, things that have happened... Well, we got a fair bit of rain and collected about 300 litres in the barrels. We also got to have a shower in the rain although it took a while to rinse off but it wasn't TOO cold and at least it was refreshing.

We went fishing again and Mandy caught a little bitty fish, whereas I caught nothing. We also went snorkeling, which we haven't had much chance to do. Found some wonderful new coral beds but I neglected to take any photos.

We have the fridge and freezer going now so that's made the variety of food available a bit more interesting.

Most of our time is spent continuing to clear the house site, which is tediously slow.

Hot, hot and a little bit cool

Lovely relaxing day in paradise today.

Today was a bit hotter than it has been recently at around 30C but we made it even hotter by burning off the trees we cut down yesterday. Amazingly they burnt pretty well considering they were green. We burnt about a cord of good firewood, but what are you gonna do...

But, also we had a bit of cool today by turning on the fridge for the first time. Nothing like a nice cool glass of lemonade (they call the fruit something like kola and they are are bit like a cross between, lemon, lime and mandarin), and a nice chilled fruit salad. You'd think with all the fruit it would be easy to get a fruit salad but it seems if you want a decent fruit salad here you have to make it yourself. Could have done with some pineapple, but. At the moment I'm just running the chest freezer with an external thermostat to run it at 4C and will monitor power before running it as a fridge and freezer.

Sherri and Larry who live on a yacht near Ano beach also called by with a nice cold homebrew stout, so it's been a refreshing day.

There was an 8.2 magnitude earthquake about half way between Fiji and us. It shook for more than 30 seconds here and there have been a few long aftershakes since. Fortunately no major tsunami because our island is not very high.

Solar panels

After a trip into town to track down some Allen Keys we mounted the solar panels today.

 

We've been using one panel leaned up against the shed for the last week or so and it's been providing enough power for lights, charging drills, headlights, laptops, radios, etc.  Although I won't actually be able to hook up all four panels (for one kilowatt) until I get some more hardware from China, two should be sufficient to start using the fridge-freezer in the coming days. We've got quite used to having no fridge but it will make life a lot easier to have a freezer.

We still haven't been able to buy any guttering but some more should arrive on one of the next few ships so hopefully it won't be too long before we can start collecting water off the shed roof. I haven't had a shower for about a month now due to lack of water, but despite advice to the contrary it is quite possible to get soap to lather up in sea water. Sure, if you try to use a block of soap in the sea it just turns to inert rubber, but if you wet yourself down and rub frantically with a block of soap out of the water it works pretty well. It's quite refreshing to stand wet and starkers in the trade winds and it largely deals to the issues of smelliness. Shampoo is similarly [in]effective.

We haven't mastered fishing here yet. We caught a one inch flounder and a couple of small, unknown reef fish, so we couldn't eat them. Some of the reef fish cause Ciguatera and we don't know which is which yet. I've seen the skipjack tuna coming up into the reef around mid-tide but for one reason or another have not been able have a fish when they were there. They're not considered a great fish by most (much like Kahawai in NZ) but they look pretty damn good to me.

The coming days have us staring down the prospect of more bush and scrub cutting to start clearing the house site. There's also still some heavy gear to cart up from the beach that we've been procrastinating about doing.

Nascent garden

It's Sunday again, the day of worship. This holy day marks the beginning of our garden, of sorts. The first papaya and sugarcane have emerged.

This week I hope to get the solar panels on the shed roof. First step was a ladder:

I've tested it to 85kg so I guess we can rate it as safe for 40kg max. 

There's a whopping great tree that casts a shadow around 3pm that I should have dropped before I put the shed up. It's going to be a bit dodgy. I might drop it before we put the panels up, just in case. At least I can repair a shed.

Empty container

Today we moved the last of the container contents over to the island. The container will get picked up on Monday and returned to the wharf. Good riddance! I probably should have taken a photo of an empty container or the last raft-load of gear but I didn't. However, after a month sleeping on an air mattress the best thing we achieved today was a real mattress.

Bliss.

We're going to go into town tomorrow to celebrate with pizza and beer. The market is particularly good on Saturdays as well. We don't often make it in on Saturdays because we bum a ride with one of the other residents of the island who goes in on Tuesdays and Fridays. We take them over in our boat and they drive us into town. It's a good deal for all.

Fair winds

We've had a break in the trade winds for a couple of days so have managed to get the solar panels, freezer, tools, fencing materials and even a couple of the 200mm x 4.8m house poles over to the island. 

We met some lovely Irish folk travelling the South Pacific who called in, curious about the poles we were moving. They have a few able-bodied lads aboard and are going to pop out tomorrow morning to haul the posts up to the house site. That will save a lot of pain winching them up. We'll have to duck back to the mainland first thing and grab the other two poles to make the most of their hospitality.

Other than that we just have 30 sheets of plywood, mattress, a door and about 30 4.8m lengths of 150x50 framing left to bring over. It's looking likely we'll make our deadline with 3 more raft trips in the coming days, weather permitting.

I saw my first local owl today... big birds. Unfortunately I found it dead in the well. We've been using rain water for the last week but we're down to about 50 litres so unless we get rain soon we'll need to clean out the well again. Well, we were going to clean it out again anyway, but that's a bit gross.

Ahhhh, a shed

We'd been sitting on our hands the last few days waiting for the wind to calm down a bit, but to no avail so yesterday we headed to the mainland in waves higher than the dinghy with a new plan. We loaded up 18 sheets of iron into the dinghy and set off to the sheltered side of the island then walked the dinghy around in the low tide to our side of the island. So, we got the iron and now we have a shed to store our stuff in. I feel more complete now that I have a shed!

 

Now the priority shifts from building a shed to moving the contents of the container over to the island. We have twelve days until the container has to be returned. It looks like Friday might be suitable to do a load on the raft so we might get solar panels and the freezer over here.

On our last trip with the raft one of the barrels took on some water and several barrels had big indentations in them. We thought we might have a crack but today we checked and they are ok. Perhaps it was just something to do with the change in air temperature? We've sealed the openings up with silicone. Fingers crossed our solar panels and freezer don't sink. We may have to walk the raft around the island.

A roof

We've been building a utility shed over the last few days and today it got a roof. One half of the shed will be enclosed for batteries, freezer, etc. and one half open for drying clothes during the wet season. 

We have to head back to the mainland for some more tin, hinges, guttering and stuff to finish it off. Hopefully the rain gods will give the roof a wash soon as it's got some suspicious yellow liquid on it that may belong to the dog at the hardware store.

A peek at the view

We've never actually seen what the view from the house site will look like because of the thick bush, so we cut a wee peek hole through today while waiting for high tide to get a load of timber.

Deforestation

The deforestation continues

Raft, rain and recharge

We ran out of data so have been cut off from the world for a few days until we could make it to the mainland but progress has been steady without access to the internet. By the way, it costs NZ$44 for 8GB of data.

Raft

We built the raft on Tuesday and did a first test tow out to Tapana with some timber for the lock-up. The picture below is the dinghy and raft stranded by a low king tide, awaiting some water to make it to the beach. The raft has the streamlining of a brick and it took us about an hour to tow it out to the island. The boat takes about 15 minutes to make the trip unladen so one hour with the raft is OK I guess, but we would be in trouble if the wind or sea came up.

Rain

You want rain? We got rain! The rain neatly filled our 200 litre drum and we got a few 20 litre buckets filled off the tent roof too. We were able to do both washing AND have a shower yesterday. We're still running it through the filter for drinking but it's delicious.

The tent largely stood up to the rain with just a few minor leaks that we will address with seam-seal when things dry out.

Recharge

We also took a couple of the solar batteries and the generator out to the island and tonight we will have our first electric light that isn't a dim led lantern. I've even got to use the laptop again so no more fiddling with a phone as a computer.

Nevertheless, even with power, nothing beats this technology:

Other than that, we've been continuing to clear trees to build the lock-up. When you cut a tree down the vines from neighbouring trees that can be up to 6 inches thick hold it up and the tree just leans over a bit. It's not until you chop down several trees all holding each other up that they come crashing down in an unpredictable massive heap. Clearing the tangled mess of vines and branches away is very time consuming.

Temporary water collection

Although Sunday is strictly a day of rest here in Tonga (you shouldn't even go swimming or fishing - just worship, eating and relaxing) we are a bit desperate for water so we quietly constructed some temporary rain collection. The chainsaw would have been handy but that might have been a bit much.

 

3.6 x 4.8 m = 27 square meters. Not huge but anything will be good for now.

Loo

A loo may not seem worth mentioning but it's a big deal for us. Sure it may benefit from some privacy enhancements yet but it's doing the job.

Today we collected some bamboo to make a frame for temporary water collection with a tarpaulin, and we also started clearing some bush and vines to make space for a permanent utilities shed for water collection and solar panels. We need to get the shed built in the next few weeks because the container needs to be returned soon.

We had our first shower in a few days now that we have our water filter in full operation. We can make about 30 litres a day, and it does indeed make a fine cup of tea, although we're still buying water for drinking. Hopefully we'll get to collect some rain in the coming days because hauling it from town is a pita.

We also got to try baked food for the first time since we arrived. Everywhere we have been has just had a gas hobb, so an oven is great. Tonight we're having kumala, corned beef, onions with coconut cream, a Tongan delicacy.

 

(I can't believe my life has come to the point where I am blogging about what I am having for dinner. I'm so sad.)

Cooking with gas

Well it took us three trips back to the mainland and a new regulator but we've finally got the gas oven going. Coconuts make a great cooking fire but this is so much more civilised.

There's not a whole lot of kiwi food here and some that is here I don't think I'll ever be buying:

Tent up

We're in the tent tonight. Barely got it up so no creature comforts yet but this will be our new home for the next 6 months or so.

 

The King whizzed through town today. The villages were decorated with flags and banners and in town they decorated the roads with children spaced every 20 meters or so. Seconds later he was gone. Never even saw him.