The Social and Scenic  sides of New Zealand
8th December 2018 to March 2019



The Town Basin marina is a very social place to say the least. More that half the boats here have crossed the Pacific and as you know, we cruisers will take any excuse to get together.

Another year rolled around and Annie celebrated her 60th birthday with friends, champagne and  even a brass band playing happy birthday.

 Celebration with Bonaire, Cinnabar and Balvenie

Happy hour on Wednesday evenings always draws a good crowd as does the ladies lunch on Thursdays, another very popular event. It’s so nice to get out and jabber with the girls without the men folk hanging around.

At the concert with Illia & Tom

 Saturday mornings the covered canopy bridge just up stream from the marina hosts an artisan craft market and on selected nights the bridge is transformed into an  large outdoor restaurant with a variety of vendors selling made-to- order meals from all over the world. My favourite was the Turkish stall.

The  Fleetwood Mac band

Many of the pubs around town put on regular quiz nights and live bands.The Fleetwood Mac cover band “Landslide” was a real hit up at the Butter Factory.  

Music in the park right on our doorstep was another great weekend free concert with brass bands, youth orchestras and Scottish pipe bands making regular appearances. So there was no excuse  not to get out and about

For  those who are musically inclined like Liam there's been ample opportunity to get together with like mined people for jam sessions a few times a week. At last count the band,  now known as the Barnacle Pluckers, comprised of three bass guitarists, three ukulele players, four acoustic guitars, a violinist, a keyboard player, a cellist, a bongo drummer and an assortment of percussionists. And man could they make a noise, it was a lot of fun. Even Mackenzie, the marina's party duck was in  attendance.

They put on a couple of shows at the marina and they were pretty damn good.

We became  quite fond of having a round of golf with with a couple of other cruisers pretty much once a week. I would go as far as saying our games have improved but we can sure  manage to hit the old *#%k shots without a problem.  Four courses were close by and they all offered heavily discounted prices on Sundays, Mondays and Fridays, so you can guess which days we always played. 
We also organized a bridal shower for Bernice from Sea Flair who was flying back to her native South Africa to marry Grant, the man of her dreams.

Bernice was all smiles

Much of the attraction of coming to NZ is to have work done on the boat and  getting out and about to explore the country by car.  By March we’d pretty much ticked off the boat chore list so it was time to hit the road and see the sights. Friends on Where 11 and Y2K were kind enough to let us borrow their cars so that we could do a bit of the North Island.

Scratching the surface with a little Tiki Touring

Over the course of a week we took in the best of the northern part of the island. Our journey took us up the coast to the Bay of Islands town of  Keri Keri. It was time for a lunch break so we headed out to the 1832 Georgian style “Stone Store”.

Over the years  the sandstone building has played many roles including as a boy’s school, a trading post, barracks and a library. 

These days it’s a quaint gift shop surrounded by lovely gardens and a trendy café.
From here it was on to the seaside village of Mangonui  for the night and to taste test the famous fish and chips the town is renowned for. 
 It was a big serve with a great setting so that scored a tick in the box. Having thrown the golf clubs in on the off chance that we spot a nice course during the trip, we  were pleased to be able to get a tee time at the ever so friendly Whangaroa Country Club.

Heading inland across the island we stopped in Kaitaia on the west coast for a couple of nights. We'd been told that driving up to Cape Reinga and  along Ninety Mile Beach was not so practical in a car such as ours as the beach could only be accessed at low tide and that you really should not attempt it in anything but a four wheel drive. So we splurged and booked ourselves on a bus tour for the day. It was a good move. 

Our ride across the dunes

 There are plenty of tours ranging in prices and they all include lunch and pretty much are identical in all other respects. We chose to book with Harrison's  who provided door to door pick ups. The drive along Ninety Mile beach was great. We never realised how vast the sand flats were, until we'd driven them.

The Snapper Bonanza fishing tournament was in full swing that day and literally hundreds of eager anglers lined the beach hoping to snare the catch of the day, in weight and take home a purse worth $30,000.
Now that's a lot of dosh in anyone's book for catching one fish.

As we continued our run up to the cape we stopped for a bit of fun at some massive sand dunes, where of course we partook in the local pastime of dune surfing.Climbing up the dunes  with board in tow was a feat in itself. Flying back down the dunes with the wind in your hair was something else. Liam was grinning like the proverbial by the time he got to the bottom.

And off he goes

Yee-Ha !

My turn too

Moving on there was plenty of jaw dropping  vistas as we made our way north to the top of New Zealand.. This is  the point where the mighty Pacific Ocean comes head to head with the often ferocious Tasman Sea. 

From our vantage point high above  the lighthouse you could actually see the waves crashing into each other. It was an awesome sight, especially for us who spend 90% of our lives on the sea.

At the very top of New Zealand

Cape Regina Lighthouse

It's a long way to anywhere from here

The Waipoua Forest was on our way south  to our next destination of Dargerville  so we stopped off to take the Tane Mahuta Walk and pay our respects to Tane Mahuta, the two thousand year old  "Lord of the Forest”, the largest living Kauri tree in the country. Quite a sight really.
The trunk girth is 13.77m, trunk height is 17.68m while the overall height of the tree is a staggering 51.2m.

From Dargerville the road took us back east through picturesque farmland and green rolling hills dotted with sheep and cattle. 

We stopped again for another round of golf at Sherwood Park  and from there it was just a stone’s throw back into Whangarei.

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New Zealand : It’s great to be here !

November 15th - 4th December 2018

It’s amazing how after months of being in small island nations, some with very limited facilities, we slip so easily back into first world suburbia and all that goes with it.

The three weeks that we spent in the Opua marina vaporized amidst a flurry of  social engagements and must-do jobs. Crossing the Pacific is hard on every boat, some fairing worse than others. We were quite lucky in that respect. Even so we still had our share of quotes to obtain.

 First up was a rigging check, not that there was anything wrong, it just made sense to do after sailing all those miles. We used NSR based in the marina grounds to do the check and were very happy with their service. Parts of our leather lounge was in a pretty bad state and we were looking at either replacing the worst parts or biting the bullet and re upholstering the lot. We also needed some adjustments to our cockpit canvas and the saloon floor was in urgent need of a sand back and re varnish.  Pretty much every cruising boat that arrives here has similar lists, and one just has to get used to playing the patience game.

The Bay of Islands Marina in Opua is a great setup. 

The staff are all super friendly and the marina has all the mod cons like great laundry facilities, and that’s usually top of the list for the girls after an ocean passage, 

There's a first rate cruisers lounge with free wi-fi and bathroom facilities like you’d find in the Hiltons or Marriotts of this world. 

Fantastic laundry setup

A well stocked general store welcomes new arrivals with a free loaf of fresh baked bread and the list goes on.
There are cafes, yacht club, canvas companies, sail lofts, two chandleries, rental cars, a courtesy shuttle to the town for shopping trips and a host of other yacht services are all on site.

 Large floating cat slips can take 20m in length

A big bonus  for people like us is that this marina has been designed with a goodly number of large and small catamaran specific slips. 

At last someone has caught on to just how many cruising cats are around these days.





While in Opua it was fabulous to catch up and spend time with some very familiar faces that we’d not seen for  years. No Rehearsal with Annie and Daryl on board  pulled into the slip next to us and  just down the dock Phil and Monica from Good Golly Miss Molly, although they were on a different boat this time. All these guys we last saw while back in the USA. Of course there were heaps more people that we’d met along the way too that arrived around the same time as us.

Liam with Daryl

With Mat & Karen off Where 11

It was a fun time doing day trips up to Keri Keri  for shopping and for a summer afternoon street party and a day out for lunch and a look around over at the pretty town of Russell  just across the bay.

Lunch at Russell with Phil & Monica

December rocked around and we headed  45 miles south down the coast to an area known as Whangarei, (pronounced fong-gur-ray). The Town Basin Marina where we'd made a booking months earlier was about to become our residential address for the remaining months of our stay in New Zealand. And to be honest we couldn’t have picked a better place to call home.

As luck would have it the day we arrived, the marina was putting on their annual welcome dinner for cruisers. It was a big event with music, a local school group performing, reps from many of the businesses around town and the Mayor gave a speech that thanked us all and recognized the importance of  foreign flagged boats for coming to Whangarei and boosting the local economy .It was a lovely way to be welcomed to the marina and the town we were about to call home.

Within a 15 minute walking distance  from our dock were supermarkets, hardware stores,  chandleries, restaurants, pubs and cafes. We were in heaven.

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Tonga to New Zealand via North Minerva Reef

7th –15th November 2018

Leaving Tonga we were greeted with a southeast breeze of 15 knots and lumpy seas on day one of our 260 mile run to  North Minerva reef. As the forecast was for the wind to increase later in the day we took the prudent sailors’ option of putting a reef in our mainsail. This sail configuration along with a full jib had GWTW cantering along at  a respectable 7-8 knots of boat speed. Nice.

By 2pm the ball game had changed. The wind had increased to 20- 25 knots and the seas were getting very rough at 2-3 m. We were now rocketing along towards the target at 15.7 knots. Hold on to your hats ladies and gentleman!  Our old girl, GWTW, not the other one, was starting to protest with creaks and groans, so for the comfort of all concerned we dropped the mainsail down to the second and last reef point and furled the jib 3/4 size. The theory was that that would slow the boat down and give us a more comfortable ride.  Theory v’s reality. Well we got the comfy ride but our speeds were still up there, peaking at 16.1 knots.

Throughout the cold dark night gradually the wind began to ease and by 4am the rough seas had moderated and our speeds had fallen back to single digits.  As 6am rocked around and our ship’s log revealed GWTW had cracked her former distance record and that she now had a personal best of 226 miles in 24 hours. Way to go girl!

Those fast speeds sent Jenny our generator into a spin and she picked up her toys and went home. She was being starved of water as we tore up the big blue highway and she doesn’t much care for that.  
By 8am she’d regained her composure and went back to the business of doing what she was programmed to do…make electricity for our floating home.

 A little info on Minerva Reefs
North Minerva Reef,and yes there is a South Minerva as well, are just specks in the vast South Pacific Ocean. A pair of submerged atolls.  Unless you zoom right in on your chartplotter you won’t find them or maybe you will unintentionally. The latter being every sailors nightmare.
North Minerva is circular in shape with an opening  through the reef into the lagoon on it’s western side. The atoll measures roughly 3.5 miles in diameter and shallows towards the inner edges of the reef from depths of 70ft in the centre of the lagoon  to 20ft or less around the perimeter. A single flashing light marks the south western side of the reef.

The two reefs were ceded to Tonga in 1972 by the South Pacific Forum. A Tongan expedition was sent out to lay claim and the Tongan flag was raised at North Minerva on June 19th of the same year. Fast forward to 2005. Fiji declared that it didn’t recognize any maritime claims by Tonga to the Minerva reefs. Later that year Fiji lodged a complaint of Tonga’s ownership with the International Seabed Authority and as you would expect Tonga lodged a counter claim.

In 2010  the Fijian navy destroyed the sole navigation light, which the Tongans had installed atop the reef to warn sailors of their impending doom. The Tongans  sailed out and rebuilt it.  This was again repeated in May 2011 and in June the Tongans were back rebuilding the light structure. We’ve been told that the reefs are still in dispute today.




In we Go
Just before 2pm we entered the pass in the reef at North Minerva. It’s a nice wide western entrance that opened up a whole new world of a tranquil lagoon with  stunning water colours. 
Dropping anchor in the middle of the ocean with no land for hundreds of miles in any direction is a bit strange to say the least. Only a few hundred meters of encircling reef separated us from the crashing ocean waves outside.

We motored across to the south east side of the lagoon where the reef was a tad higher than the rest, therefore giving us more protection at high tide. Dropping the hook in 15ft of turquoise water over sheer white sand….perfect. We’d hadn’t seen water colour like this since  our time in the Bahamas.

The following day was a lay day so Liam and Tom from Cinnabar hit the water in search of lobster. They spent hours checking out as many nooks and crannies as they could find and were about to give up when three good size ones were spotted. Two of the three got away unscathed, but Liam managed the killer shot on the third.

Next morning all the other boats left for New Zealand. We were now truly alone, anchored on this little patch of shallow water in the middle of the ocean…eerie stuff. 

Liam & Tom looking for Lobsters

Success

We’d planned to stay in this idyllic place a few days longer as we were waiting on friends from Where 11 to show up.  But they had a change of heart  along the way and emailed us that they’d decided not to stop. Had we known a day earlier we too would have headed off with the other boats. It’s always nice to have company on a long passage. ...c'est la vie.

We had a rethink and decided that with a strong low pressure system approaching we’d leave at day break and make a run for NZ in the hope of making landfall before we smacked by the strong south easterlies. It would be an 800 mile run against the clock.

Leaving Minerva for the down hill run to NZ

What’s up Doc ?
Something just didn’t sound right as we raised the mainsail the following morning. The halyard and the windless pulling it to the top of the mast was making a horrible screeching sound. It took a moment to figure it out and then we realized that the outer core of the halyard had separated from the stronger inner core, The noise we’d heard was the halyard slipping as the windless tried to grab it with each turn. Luckily it had failed just as we reached the first reefing point, so we would still be able to keep the pace up. Once the wind kicked in though we’d have to put the second reef in and that would be how it would stay until we reached NZ regardless of the wind conditions as it was impossible to raise the sail any further.

The closer we  inched toward New Zealand the further the mercury dropped. 
We’d been in the tropics for such a long that we just weren’t ready to don track pants and fleeces, but we had no choice. 
It was a good thing that I'd unpacked them and our doona before leaving Tonga.

The 800 mile passage from Minerva Reef to Opua in the Bay of Islands, New Zealand took us four and a half days. 

By far the final twenty four hours was the roughest we’d experienced since sailing out of Sydney heads back in 2006. 
Thirty knots of wind, driving rain and the accompanying rough seas  hit us like a freight train at  2am and didn’t let up. Ten foot breaking seas crashed into us dead on our beam. 
Water cascaded over the entire boat and the cockpit floor looked more like a swimming pool rather than its usual dry self. 

The books off our bookshelf all hit the floor and it was impossible to sleep when off watch due to the noise and the violent motion. Our dingy hanging from its davits broke a line when a massive wave dumped itself into it and we were perilously close to loosing our only form of transport from the mothership to land as it swung violently side to side just inches above the hungry waves. We clung to the thoughts that it wasn’t much further to sail.

Just a dot on the horizon, but there it is, New Zealand !

The land of the Long White Cloud
Finally at 10am on November 15th the ”land ho” call ran out. Just barely visible on the horizon was the land mass of New Zealand. 

By 4.30 that afternoon, we’d been cleared by customs, immigration and biosecurity and we motored into our berth at the Bay of Islands Marina.

My well loved plants had to go over the side

Stepping ashore with rubbery legs we strolled up to the clubhouse for a quick bite to eat and catch up with friends we’d met during this years passages. 

By 7pm The Sandman was banging on our door and we could hardly keep our eyes open. We fell into bed for a totally well deserved calm night’s sleep.






We’d finally made it to New Zealand and  with that yet another chapter in our cruising life has closed.









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