South Pacific Sailing: ‘Niue is a tiny country almost no one has ever heard of’

Niue, a tiny island, captures Miranda Baker’s heart after an adventurous South Pacific sailing passage via Minerva Reef, the mid-ocean refuge

It feels like a big deal to finally leave New Zealand’s shores, after all the hard work we’ve put into getting ready for this moment.

Two years, including nine months living up a ladder on the hard in a dirty, rain drenched boat yard, spent stripping our 1985 48ft, steel Mason Fortaleza of all her systems and rebuilding her. I’d like to take some credit for this refit but really it was Elliot who did it all – my best friend, captain and YouTube-taught electrician, plumber, rigger, mechanic and carpenter.

And here we are, on the most iridescently beautiful New Zealand winter’s day, pulling out of Marsden Cove Marina, waving and yelling to friends and family on shore as we head off to explore the world, very, very slowly. It’s a monumental feeling of surrendering to whatever unfolds. A true letting go. We’ve sold everything we own except for what is right here with us on Fortaleza. The plan is vaguely to head west until the money runs out.

Before we can begin to head west though, we need to get north to the South Pacific tradewinds and what I’ve been promised will be easy seas and sailing. I have no sailing experience other than our pretty hairy shakedown sail around the Bay of Islands and down the east coast of New Zealand. Elliot has thousands of nautical miles in his wake.

We have decided to head to Tonga via Minerva Reef to begin with. The weather window we set off in allows for a slight easterly heading. A front has just passed and we’re catching the tail of it. Our freshly painted hull and 20 knot winds have us hissing through the water on a beam reach occasionally hitting 9 knots. It’s glorious and the sense of freedom is almost overwhelming. New Zealand shrinks behind us and open water stretches away on every side.

Days and shifts pass in a boat-lag blur. We see one other boat, a yacht we know, who comes close enough while overtaking us for us to photograph them and radio a greeting. It is oddly reassuring to see human life out here. There isn’t much else. Just eternal greys and blues.

Wave after wave after wave, the only lumpy interruptions to the otherwise flat 360° horizon. The occasional dolphin pod races against our bow, turning on their sides to eyeball us as we stupidly shout hellos. We awe at fiery sunsets and sleepily greet hope-filled dawns.

Half way between Minerva and New Zealand, around 380 miles from each, we spend a day becalmed in the bluest water imaginable. There isn’t a ripple, just a very slow, gentle, rolly under-swell.

The closest humans to us are on the international space station, the nearest dry land almost twice as far again. There is 4km of water between us and the sea floor. It is completely quiet. We are alone and suspended, bobbing on our tiny boat-shaped cork, in a place so isolated, alien and weird it makes us dizzy to think about. The blueness is mesmerising, inky and terrifying – so we decide to swim.

Our guiding intention for our cruising life is to ‘throw caution to the wind, carefully’. And so, with the Jaws theme tune ear-worming our brains and unhelpful flashbacks to the movie Open Water popping into our minds, we set Fortaleza’s wheel hard over so she can only drift in circles, trail a 150m long floating line, put two ladders over, scour the water around us for megalodonic behemoth shadows and hurl ourselves, naked, into the indigo deep.

It is exhilarating and, honestly, singularly the most mentally terrifying thing I have ever willingly done. I’d like to say that we linger and enjoy the experience, but the truth is we’ve never got out of the water faster.

South Pacific Sailing to the Minerva Reef

Four days (including 30 frustrating hours of motoring) later we arrive at Minerva Reef and find our depth sounder has given up the ghost. Minerva is not a place you want to show up to without a depth sounder.

It’s a monumental underwater mountain that rises suddenly out of 2,000m of water, named after one of the first ships that discovered it by sailing straight into it back in 1829. Easily done. It is hard to see if you don’t know it’s there and ships have routinely wrecked at Minerva ever since.

We decide to trust the charts and enter its southern mountain-top lagoon to anchor up and rest, picking our way past bommies to join three yachts already inside.
There is no visible land at Minerva except for some random rocks that show up at low tide, just massive surf pounding along the kilometres-long, invisible arc where wild ocean swell hits the reef.

It’s an odd place to anchor and a phenomenal place to explore because, while there’s not a lot to see out of the water, under it is a whole other story. The snorkelling is spectacular.

Cutting through the reef are 20m-deep channels that create laneways and a towering cityscape for diverse sea life. Groups of fat sea trout patrol like mafia bosses. Shoals of small bright things flash and dart, synchronised. Turtles startle and sidle away. Purse-lipped giant clams sporting garish lipsticks sit plump and patient.

White tipped reef sharks circle, their eyes on us, ours on them. Monster crayfish retreat into dark corners. For two days we swim among it all for hours, captivated, until we are frozen and pruney.

On the third day we decide to leave. It’s a hard decision knowing we’re unlikely to ever visit this extraordinary place again, but the forecast has us excited. The wind has shifted around to the south-west, which is uncommon for June and, for sailors without a plan, it creates an opportunity. Off to the east of Tonga, about a six-day sail away, is a tiny country that almost no one has ever heard of, Niue.

Little-known Niue

Niue is a cauliflower head of coral, the largest of its kind, that sits on its own in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. It is just 45km in circumference, 70m high and home to fewer than 2,000 people. The sides of the cauliflower head drop straight into the sea, vertically to 2,000m.

Migrating humpback whales are known to swim right up to the cliffs. One plane a week brings visitors from New Zealand, once a month food and supplies arrive by container ship. The depths around the shoreline mean there is no anchoring, but we’ve read there are some mooring balls available for visiting boats.

We have enough food, we have the right wind, we have no definitive plan and we really want to visit, so we lift our anchor, head out of Minerva and bear north-east.

The sail to Niue is downwind all the way. Light to middling winds, a lot of rolling and infuriating sail slapping. Even tethered, the boom is bouncing as the sails empty with each roll and we experiment with every combination of sails we are carrying, ultimately breaking out our unused poles and sailing wing-on-wing for most of the trip. We make a mental note to invest in a spinnaker of some sort.

On the fourth day, alarmingly, Elliot finds the clevis pin from the boom’s gooseneck sitting on the deck.

One slam too many must have sheared the split pin off. Somehow, miraculously, because the mainsail is up, the boom is held in place by our topping lift and hasn’t crashed onto the deck. It is a sobering moment followed by some swearing, some at-sea MacGyvering, and some gratitude for what had seemed an absurd amount of spare everything we are carrying. We cobble together a new pin using a bolt and continue on our way.

When Niue finally comes into view it has been 14 days since we touched dry land. We are excited to grab a mooring ball and head ashore, to clear in and find our land legs. Just as we arrive, the heavens open and a biblical deluge erupts, followed by monstrous winds. Elliot, drenched and holding on for dear life, manages to grab the ball and secure us, but within an hour we’re wildly bucking into ugly on-shore waves.

Pulling hard on the mooring ball, Fortaleza’s bow nose-dives green water while our stern is only 50m from Niue’s coral reef skirt. We aren’t sure whether the mooring balls have been maintained, or to what ratings.

Conditions, held tight to the mooring, are worse than open ocean. Reluctantly we admit there’s no way we’re going to rest here, or get to shore. So, exhausted and deeply disappointed, we drop the mooring ball and sail south to find shelter round on Niue’s east coast.

Niue only has mooring balls on its usually sheltered westerly coast. Anchoring is not permitted, nor is it possible thanks to the depths. So while the east coast provides us some cover from the onslaught, we’re unable to stop.

For the rest of the night we sail as slowly as we can up the east side of the island until, at dawn, we find ourselves in a quandary: the west side of the island is being hammered by enormous swells, which still make the mooring balls unusable; there’s no place to drop our hook, and we are at least a week’s sail from anywhere else. Samoa is north of us. Tonga is west of us. It is Day 15 at sea.

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Lulls and lullabies

The Windy forecast shows more stable conditions just north of our position, towards Samoa, so we decide to sail north and wait out whatever is going on down here.

As predicted we find calmer seas and spend the next five days drifting in a huge 90-mile circle. No sails. No motoring. Just adrift in a vast expanse of blue hues in every direction. We roll with every roll of the ocean. The motion slowly lolling to and fro, to and fro. Everything on board rolls, clangs and bumps with every heave.

Somewhere on Fortaleza something small is rolling and thumping, rolling and thumping but we can’t find it no matter how hard we look: it’s madness inducing. We sleep and read, make scones and paddleboard.

I’ve heard whales are attracted to music so I blast the stereo at full volume through our steel hull. I try everything from Elvis to Vivaldi, sitting on deck scouring the sea for friendly giant breaths and dark shadows. It doesn’t work but, to Elliot’s frustration, that doesn’t stop me from trying.

On the morning of Day 21, a breeze from the east picks up and we guess the residual swells must now be subdued, so we sail back south to where we started.

As we arrive back at Niue’s mooring balls we’re happy to find other cruisers already secured and the swell, while still large, has lost its violence. We grab a ball and, after a three hour fight to lower our motor onto our dinghy thanks to the differential motion created by the sea state, head over to the jetty, desperate now to touch land and stop endlessly moving.

Niue is unique in many ways – geographically, geologically, culturally, biodiversity – but one of its most unique aspects for cruisers is going ashore. The sides of the island are so sheer and jagged that there’s no beach or boat ramp, just an enormous concrete jetty used by the cargo ships.

On one side of the jetty, which the day we arrive is being smashed by the swell, is a crane. A 20m high, industrial, mechanised crane. We need to hoist our dinghy onto the jetty. There’s no one else around to help so we do a couple of fly-pasts to make a plan. It is quite daunting.

Elliot noses the dinghy close enough to the jetty for me to jump out, timing my leap with the swell which is back-washing off the jetty’s rough hewn, concrete steps with some force. It takes several goes and a lot of shouting before I make it. At one point, over the roar of the outboard and waves, I hear Elliot yelling “Commit Miranda, commit!” and I consider punching him.

Eventually I land, dizzy, on solid ground, and with unsteady sea-legs buckling I rush to read the laminated crane instructions nailed to its frame, while Elliot circles nearby, dodging waves and a nearby reef. Pulling on a thick, heavy rope I manoeuvre the arm of the crane out over the water, and, pressing a button marked DOWN, lower its foot-long, wildly swinging steel hook down to Elliot’s head level.

Elliot positions himself and the dinghy under it, one hand steering himself into incoming waves, the other attempting to attach our homemade, untested Dyneema boat sling onto the crane hook. It takes several aborted attempts.

Once on, the dinghy is held by the crane hook at the same time as it rises and falls with each surge, causing it to alternate between being momentarily violently suspended, then being lifted, the hook smashing into the floor of the dinghy as a wave passes underneath. Elliot’s head is in the middle of the danger and it all seems incredibly reckless.

I hit the UP button with Elliot clinging on, the dinghy slowly lifting out of the water at the same time as being smashed by oncoming waves. All our trust is in the Dyneema now as Elliot and the dinghy are dangling 4m above the angry sea and I grab the rope to heave the crane arm back in and over the jetty, where I lower them safely to the ground.

We both collapse in a heap of out of breath whoops, hurrahs and fist pumping. Twenty-two days – and one crane – later, and we have made it to Niue.

Once we catch our breath we head up to the Customs building where a jolly, dark-haired Father Christmas lookalike seems to find our dishevelment amusing. He talks to us about New Zealand and whales and his family, and he laughs a lot.

Another couple, Alan and Maria from SV Jamala are also checking in. We don’t know it yet but we’ll continue to cruise with Jamala through Tonga and Fiji. Right now, though, they’re strangers who invite us to hire a car with them to explore what Niue has to offer – which is a lot for a teeny island.

Dips in cool, freshwater, underground swimming holes, snorkelling in crystal clear water, forest walks and almost as many churches as there are residents. A weirdly good pizza restaurant. Evenings are spent whale watching from high up on cliffs as the sun sets to the west.

Niue is wonderfully quirky. There’s a prison, where the prisoners let themselves out for a round of golf each morning before reincarcerating themselves. And there’s the Niue Yacht Club, a two-roomed, unlocked building with showers and a laundry tub, but no members. There are smiling faces everywhere.

We spend three days exploring. After their first landing experiences, the other crews don’t return to their boats each night. They all take accommodation ashore rather than risk the crane again, but we start and end each day running its gauntlet and begin to feel like pros.

Niue is enchanting, charming and friendly and it crosses our minds to stay forever. But the south-westerly wind is gradually picking back up and our hand is forced, it’s time to leave. With some sadness we let Fortaleza free of our mooring ball and set our course west, to Tonga.

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