A few photos from Auckland and the Hauraki Gulf

We're sitting in an cafe in Coromandel town, drinking flat white coffees and enjoying a late-morning waffle (by which I mean something to eat, not aimless chatter, for once).

Here are a few photos from the past week:

The Sky Tower

The view from the tower of Auckland Bridge and the huge Westhaven marina

The sign said 'This glass is 28mm thick and is as strong as the concrete floor around it'. Good! The street is 170m below

Mad fool who paid $200 or so to jump off a perfectly good building

Islands to the east of Waiheke

Creative graffiti at Stony Batter

Hooks Bay anchorage, Waiheke

Easily-amused Emus in Coromandel

Leaving Auckland

After a really good City Break, we're leaving Auckland today in bright sunshine to go and sail around the Hauraki Gulf. We've thoroughly enjoyed the city and even did the touristy thing to go up the Sky Tower the other day - 220m up at the Observation Deck gives you a pretty good view of the harbour.

There's another Photosynth view from the tower here

and a second here

As we were preparing Maunie for sea yesterday we had a visitor call in for afternoon tea - Neil Murray is head of the Coastguard Boating Education operation here (they run Yachtmaster courses and similar) and he was the skipper of the first Challenge yacht that we sailing on for a crossing from Plymouth to St Malo back in 1999! Small world!

The Camping Car

We can now reveal the second part of our plan for a couple of months of four-wheeled cruising in New Zealand. 

The Honda gains a new addition

Having realised that camper vans were beyond our budget to rent or buy (unless we were prepared to buy something old, high-mileage and probably unreliable), we'd settled on the car (with which we are absolutely delighted, by the way) and a tent. However we had our eyes on a tent with a difference - one that mounts on the car roof. Graham's boss, Tim, had such a thing mounted on a Land Rover for the Glastonbury Festival so we were delighted to find a company importing them from Australia; delight turned to frustration, however, when we discovered they'd just sold their last one and the next delivery wouldn't be until late February, a month too late for our planned trip.

This set-back turned out to be serendipidous, though, as we then saw an advert on Trade Me (the NZ version of eBay) for a second-hand tent. The photo even showed it fitted to a Honda CRV like ours! We put a bid in and were successful so took a lovely 3-hour scenic drive to Tauranga yesterday to collect it.

The sellers were a wondeful retired English couple, Graham and Liz, who'd moved to NZ having lived in Zambia for nearly 30 years. Though they'd loved the tent, they'd finally decided that the comforts of a camper van might be a good thing (and one is being shipped to them from the UK) so were selling it to make space in their garage. We liked them immediately and Graham (who's ex Royal Navy so spent a year in Dartmouth in the 60's) proudly showed us the additions and modifications he'd made to fit it to the Honda; like us he'd been concerned about overloading the roof-rack so had added additional stengthening bars and vertical support props to take the weight of the occupants. A perfect solution!

So, after a couple of hours back in the marina car park bolting the tent base to our roof bars we are delighted with our purchase. It takes only about 10 minutes to erect and pack away, the 7'x 5' double bed is very comfortable and the large awning provides shelter for cooking and eating below it. We can't wait to try it out for our first night's camping at the beginning of February!

The unfolded tent, complete with ladder to the upstairs bedroom. Guy ropes will replace Graham to hold the awning!

The outer canvas removed to show the inner tent; the four extra support props can be seen under the left hand side.

Testing for  comfort

PS When we bought the car we new it'd need a new battery (the result of under-use) so fitted one yesterday. After that, of course, the CD Stereo demanded a security code that we couldn't find in the paperwork - "rats", we muttered. However the Honda dealership where it was bought 13 years ago was just around the corner and within a couple of minutes they provided us with the code and confirmed on their computer system that the car was up to date in its servicing. "There aren't many Hondas of that age with such a good service record!" the Service Manager commented. 

A different kind of cruising

Yesterday we were up bright (ish) and early to greet the arrival of a very different kind of cruising vessel, the enormous Celebrity Solstice which had Di's Aunty Brenda and her friend Claire aboard.

Early morning in the Wynyard district

A substantial rear

Claire, Dianne & Brenda

Aboard Maunie. Brenda isn't a keen sailor but we're hoping to convert her after her cruise!

We had a lovely day with them before driving them to the airport for their return flight to Australia.

Flying the flag and racing against an Americas Cup yacht

We had a great day-sail today with Auckland friends Tony and Claire aboard. It started with us fulfilling an ambition to sail under the Auckland Harbour Bridge with the Yeo Valley spinnaker flying:

As we sailed out into the Hauraki Gulf we spotted the iconic shape of an Americas Cup Yacht ahead of us. Now, whenever two boats are sailing in the same direction it always becomes a race so we gave chase, trimming the Parasailor within an inch of its life:

Target identified, full speed ahead

Getting closer

Almost there! The motor yacht coming the other way is Tom Cruise's, by the way (complete with helicopter on the stern and lots of boys' toys in the hanger)

Passed 'em! The camera never lies - though the order of photo's might not be quite right!

The professional crew on the AC yacht were very intrigued by our Parasailor - so much so that they came very close!

After all this sailing excitement we anchored for lunch and had a lovely sail back into Westhaven Marina

Birthday & New Year

On the subject of birthdays, a very big thank you from Dianne to all those lovely people who sent e mail greetings!

 

As we celebrate the arrival of 2014 first here in NZ, in the fabulous (or should we say awesome?!) city of Auckland we would like to wish everybody a very happy new year.

 

Blog fact:  Auckland, according to our great friend and top blog follower, Simon Raine, is named after his home town of West Auckland in the North East of England. (If you'd like any further Auckland-related facts, please e mail us and we'll put you in touch as he can go on for hours!)

 

Our celebrations this evening (photos to follow) included sun-downer drinks with Regina and Michael from Anico and then a fabulous Japanese meal at Daikoku. Back on Maunie, the fireworks from the centre of Auckland surround us- perfect!

2014!

Happy New Year to you all!

Yesterday was a busy but fun day starting with Graham cycling out on a borrowed bike to go and collect our car! As we said before, we’d been looking at different vehicles and, once we’d found that camper vans were very expensive (and being snapped up for the summer), we started looking on Trade Me (the NZ version of eBAy) for a suitable alternative – something roomy and reasonably economical - and decided that a Honda CRV was just the thing, plus a tent (more on this in a later blog!).  

NZ imports heaps (as they say here) of ex-Japanese market cars so we looked at a few but Graham's engineering background couldn't quite reconcile the handbook being in Japanese nor the complete absence of any owner or service history. The Kiwi mentality is very laid back so they’d just say ‘she’ll be right’ and make a purchase but luckily we saw an advert for a private sale of a low-mileage 2000 model. Things looked promising when we arrived at an extremely nice neighbourhood and the owner pressed the remote control and the garage door rolled up to reveal a very shiny CRV. He’s had it from new and it had only done 110,000km (50k miles!) as their third car; it looks almost like new and has a very rare thing in NZ – a fully-stamped service book (by the Honda main dealer) with all the big jobs like cambelt and coolant changes done on time. It’s lovely to drive and we had a super first trip out over the Auckland bridge to North Head to climb the volcanic hill and view the city in the afternoon.

Di with her birthday present!

Very shiny car

North Head is a volcanic hill which has acted as a fort to protect Auckland from as long ago as the 1880's when it was feared that Russia might invade so there are old gun emplacements from that ere and miles of tunnels and guns from the first and second world wars. The view across the harbour entrance to Auckland is, as they say here, awesome!

A 19th Century 'disappearing gun' - when fired the recoil made it drop down into the pit for reloading

The city, with the Sky Tower clearly visible

The grand finale of the day was the fantastic firework display from the Sky Tower which we watched from the comfort of our cockpit.