Minerva Reef

Minerva Reef is a great true story of men against the sea. It is also a profoundly moving document of human faith and endurance.
On the night of 7 July 1962 the twenty ton cutter Tuaikaepau, sailing from Tonga to Auckland, ran hard upon the outer edge of Minerva Reef, 380 miles south of Suva in Fiji. Heavy seas and the sharp teeth of the coral quickly broke the cutter to pieces, and her complement of seventeen Tongans found themselves without even a small boat on a reef that was totally submerged except during the few hours of low tide each day.