In Auckland and expending Boat Units

Our temporary home in Pier 21 is proving to be brilliant - really handy for the city and, after a month on the mooring with its inherent dinghy-ride ashore, the pontoon berth with its electricity and water supplies really is a luxury.

A panoramic view of the Pier 21 Marina - the big building with the advert to the right is a 'dry-stack' where motorboats are posted into storage slots about five-high, the equivalent of a multi-story car park!

Our neighbours are Colin and Ana on Ithaka who are really busy preparing the boat for the 5,000 mile crossing to Chile in a couple of weeks. We're going to drag them away for a bit of a party on Saturday night as we know what it's like when your focus becomes the boat and the attendant long list of jobs to be done in a very short time.

Two British boats a long way from home!

Ana hard at work, installing new fixing points for an emergency drogue

Of course, on Maunie we're ploughing through a list of things to do too and spending Boat Units. Other sailors will know that BOAT is an acronym ("Bring Out Another Thousand") and

so boat projects are measured in Boat Units ($1000). We've just spent pretty much one Boat Unit on a couple of deck fittings:

The 'foot blocks' which lead the yankee and spinnaker sheets (and therefore carry a heavy load) to the main cockpit winches. The sheaves (pulley wheels) were grinding due to worn bearings which was making winching really hard work

Upon removal the dreaded galvanic corrosion (between unlike metals in sea water) is obvious. The stainless steel bolts had welded themselves to the aluminium body so there was no way we could get the blocks apart.

One Boat Unit later (and some tricky drilling into the stainless steel mounting plates because, of course, the holes didn't align!) we have some snazzy ball-bearing blocks made by Harken

Some of our jobs use only a few tenths of a Boat Unit, such as getting the inflatable dinghy professionally patched (it's doing pretty well for 17 years old so we're hoping a bit of tlc now will keep it going until we get back to the UK) and some jobs just need our time and patience to complete:

The saloon table sanded back for its first coat of varnish

Apart from the work, we've been managing some nice walks (the very sought-after Auckland district of Ponsonby, with it's smart cafes and coffee shops, is about 15 minutes walk from the boat) and we had a visit from Ali and Reg (Ali is Chair of Tideford Organics in Totnes, where Graham did some project work) yesterday as they'd just arrived for a 4 week tour of NZ. A lovely small-world moment!