Vava’u was the first group of islands of the Kingdom of Tonga I reached with Shigeo. I needed to get MaRe out of the water to get the shaft seals replaced at the STB saildrive and have the hulls cleaned to be allowed to enter NZ without having her immediately hauled out for cleaning. I understand the need of bio-security but think that the garbage drifting ashore uncontrolled is underestimated. Does NZ intend to reduce foreign yachts going there? This thought went through my mind when I did all preparations for going to NZ.<\/p>\n
I learned from friends, SV My Destiny, about the inbound clearance procedure and where to dock that all can be done in Vava’u.<\/p>\n
Via VHF CH 16 I got permission to enter the harbor and dock at the Fishery Wharft, which is also used for inbound clearance. The problem was that there was no space to dock MaRe. The space between 2 local fishing boats was shorter than MaRe is long.<\/p>\n
I called the harbor master and was advised to drop the anchor and go to customs office. Leaving the boat without being cleared in is normally not allowed. However, when the harbor master advised to do so, it should be fine.<\/p>\n
I took the tender to go ashore. Climbing up the wall was almost a challenge. The wall was pretty high and no ladder was mounted somewhere. Asking the next people I saw, I could easily find the customs office. It was a desk at the entrance area in a large warehouse and a room or two behind.<\/p>\n
The friendly lady asked me to dock MaRe at another place stuff she advised. It turned out that this is the real customs dock not the inbound and outbound clearance dock used by customs. Sounds a bit confusing but I followed her advice.<\/p>\n
For customs clearance I went to the office again and found that they all were on lunch break. Sorry, sorry, sorry. I returned at 1330 and a part of the inbound clearance could be done. The lady apologized for the delay of health and bio-security clearance but the officers are still at the airport. However, they will come be in about 30 min on board of MaRe. And indeed they arrived after about 30 min. Filling in a bunch of papers passing the fees and all was done. I could go back to customs for the final inbound clearance.<\/p>\n
After being cleared in, I decided to leave this dock and go to one of the buoys where all the other boats where hook up. Anchoring is not allowed and at a water depth of 30 + m not feasible even with a hundred meter chain. Hooking up to a buoy here is much easier than it is in Croatia. Thus, we quickly got this thing done, cleared up the boat, and took the tender to the dinghy dock at the restaurant Mango; the best dinghy dock I ever used.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Vava’u was the first group of islands of the Kingdom of Tonga I reached with Shigeo. I needed to get MaRe out of the water to get the shaft seals replaced at the STB saildrive and have the hulls cleaned to be allowed to enter NZ without having her immediately hauled out for cleaning. I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1340","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-15"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sosx.de\/cat-mare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1340","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sosx.de\/cat-mare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sosx.de\/cat-mare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sosx.de\/cat-mare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sosx.de\/cat-mare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1340"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sosx.de\/cat-mare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1340\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sosx.de\/cat-mare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1340"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sosx.de\/cat-mare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1340"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sosx.de\/cat-mare\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1340"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}