We came into Neiafu to fix an autopilot and to catch our breath, and we found a kingdom instead. To say that Tonga is a special place is an understatement in more ways than I can count. The people, the landscape, and the whales set it apart from anywhere else this trip has taken us. I had planned a pit stop on the way to Fiji. Tonga had other plans.

The bay at Neiafu was the first properly flat water we had sat in for a long time, and after weeks of rolling anchorages the stillness felt almost suspicious. It made for a restful stay. I walked the streets, hiked where there was something to hike, and let the days organize themselves around small errands and long lunches. Nobody was in a hurry, and after a while neither was I.

The town is full of characters, friendly and welcoming and each one more interesting than the last. There was a pool hall lit like a stage where the games ran late and the spectators took the results as seriously as the players did. There was a cafe cat that inspected every bag that came up the wharf. It was not a bad place to be stuck waiting on parts.

The rugby was the event of the week. Two village sides, no fences, everyone on the touchline, and a standard of tackling that would make a professional wince. The hits came in low and honest and the crowd called every one of them. I stood on the grass with everybody else and lost the afternoon to it. Nobody asked for a ticket.

And then there were the whales. Vava'u sits on the humpback migration, and I went out to swim with them, which is a thing you can do here and a thing I will not soon get over. In the water they are impossibly large and impossibly calm, and they know exactly where you are, and they move around you with the courtesy that big things owe small things.

From Neiafu we dropped down to Port Maurelle and spent a couple of days snorkeling, sitting around fires on the beach with the other cruisers, and doing very little worth reporting. Then, around midnight, we slipped out for the crossing south to the middle islands of the Ha'apai group. The winds were light and the night was warm enough for shorts and a T-shirt. It felt less like a passage and more like a lap of the harbor that forgot to end.

As the sun came up I saw the first whale, and then I understood that we had wandered into some kind of whale alley between the island groups. Whale after whale, breaches and tails and blows in every quarter. Halfway across we found Disney Reef, a patch of coral that comes out of nowhere and rises to about four metres below the surface. The lines went in and three fish came up almost immediately, and while I was bringing them aboard a pair of humpbacks surfaced maybe thirty feet off the beam. We shut the engine down and drifted, and I sat there and let them decide how the afternoon would go. By the time we raised Ha'ano I had counted more than thirty pairs. Some of them were surely the same whales twice. I have decided not to care.

That day of the crossing was also the anniversary of the day I lost my mother, a few years ago now. I try to do something worthy of her on that date every year, and this year the ocean handled the arrangements. A warm night, a fair wind, and a channel full of whales between two island groups. She would have loved it. We sailed in quietly and dropped the anchor off Ha'ano, and I sat in the cockpit a while before going below.