At  the Tongan island of Ha’afera, a coral is cored in very shallow water. Usually we drilled corals on SCUBA, but this one appeared to have a solid skeleton.  The colony was dead on top and live on the sides.  We cored the dead top and live sides.  It turns out the top of the colony died in the 1982/83 Very Strong El Niño when sea level fell as much as 20-30 cm in the Tonga region.  We were able to splice the oxygen isotope and strontium/calcium data from “live top”core from the side onto the long core from the center after reconstructing the annual cycle in water temperature. The resulting chronology extends from 2004 to 1791 C.E. The data from this core is used in the Linsley et al. (2015) paper in Geophysical Research Letters.