Cruising the Northland Coast

We've just left Whangarie, a large (ish) city south of Opua and north of Auckland where the river meanders up almost ten miles from the sea to deliver you into a very nice marina right in the hear of town. We've had a fairly frenetic couple of days taking full advantage of the great shops and local services.

 

We're now heading back towards Opua where we'll be for a week or so for our haul-out. Some photos to follow when we get back there and we hope that our newly-fettled pc will be good for more reliable Skype calls now it has had extra memory installed; we look forwards to chatting to friends and family.

 

The coastline is spectacular and even the Marsden Point oil refinery looked strangely pretty in the sunset last night.

Exploring the Bay of Islands

Maunie and a schooner anchored in Army Bay, Moturua Island

 

After the (relatively) busy environment of Opua, it's lovely to be out in the Bay of Islands, exploring this beautiful area. We had some pretty heavy rain showers over the past couple of days but have been able to inflate the kayak and paddle ashore for some short walks between the showers.

 

After the often-too-deep anchorages of the Pacific islands, we're getting used to depths of around 3-4m in the bays and watching the depth sounder as we navigate around the islands. Not quite carefully enough, yesterday, as we gently scraped over a sandbank as we nosed in towards one bay – no damage except to pride as we were doing less than one knot.

 

Some of the islands are privately-owned, with some exceptionally smart houses, but most are managed by the Department of Conservation with well-marked walking trails so it's great to be able to stretch our legs and get some exercise. The weather looks set to improve over the weekend so the mostly empty anchorages will no doubt become a bit busier but it definitely seems that this is very early-season for the local yachts. The wildlife is out in force though, with Gannets and the quaintly-named Variable Oystercatchers swooping around and the cheeky Red Billed Gulls perching on our rails. Dianne is particularly delighted to have seen two Blue Penguins swimming alongside Maunie and on a walk yesterday we were entertained by native birds called Tuis (after which the beer that Graham drinks occasionally is named) collecting flower nectar only a few feet from us.

 

Our fellow blue water cruisers are beginning to arrive in serious numbers now so we'll look forward to catching up with friends when we go back to Opua on the 15th. Until then we'll be back to relying on Sat phone email with no internet.

A man walks into a pub.....

Well, not a pub but a yacht club, actually... We went to the Opua Cruising Club on Saturday for a very good evening meal.There were a dozen or so people watching the TV at the far end of the room - the All Blacks Vs Japan rugby - so Dianne went to ask one of them the score. Ten minutes later she came back and told me that Don, a South African yachtsman who has now settled here, had offered us the use of his car the following day! Can't imagine this happening in a British club!

Anyway we borrowed the car yesterday and had our first 'day off' from boat jobs so drove round to the pretty town of Russell for an excellent Sunday lunch then called back via the supermarket to restock with some groceries. A good day.

This relaxed attitude to cars seems to be quite common in New Zealand. Lots of second-hand cars get shipped over from Japan so it's very common to see 15 year old Toyotas and Hondas (often with 300,000 km on the clock) on the roads. There's a strict 'WOF' (Warranty of Fitness' requirement (an equivalent of the British MOT, but carried out every 6 months) but otherwise motoring can be pretty cheap;you don't even need insurance as there's a government 3rd-party scheme in place. 

This makes buying a car a cheaper option  than renting one for any extended period so we're thinking about this for the New Year when we head off on four wheels to explore South Island and the mountains.

We've a few more boat jobs to finish today then will god sailing around the Bay of Islands for a week or so. We've had the sewing machine out to replace UV-degraded stitching in our sail covers and dodgers and to make an additional at-sea cover for our pilot house upholstery (which Graham then accidentally tested by knocking a glass of gin & tonic over last night). This morning has dawned calm and slightly foggy so ideal conditions to refit our freshly-maintained sails; the weather forecast isn't great for the next couple of days (strong winds) so we'll be looking to find a secure anchorage to sit out the weather.

Enn Zed Plans

It's been a busy few days but we've made great progress on some important boat servicing jobs. The outboard has just come back from the workshop after its first year service and we collected the sails from the North Sails loft this morning after some tlc and minor repairs. Overall they are still in excellent condition, we're glad to say.

Roger Hall, sailmaker, with our mainsail

We're now waiting for a response from the German manufacturers of our Windpilot so we've removed the wind vane assembly since it doesn't achieve anything without a rudder!

Planning ahead, we aim to go off cruising around the Bay of Islands early next week for 10 days or so then will come back here to have Maunie lifted out of the water for some maintenance jobs below the waterline. After that we'll be sailing slowly down the coast to Auckland where we'll probably spend Christmas and New Year. So we'll update the blog every week or so when we have news / nice photos to share.

Boat work and photos

Since we arrived on Sunday,we've been very busy. Maunie's in the very nice Opua Marina where the staff are really welcoming and helpful and the facilities superb. We've put all our clothes through the excellent launderette and even put the cushion covers from the pilot house through the washing machines to get rid of the accumulated salt and grime of a year's blue-water sailing. Meanwhile we've hoisted and fresh-water rinsed the sails before taking them off and the local sailmaker will collect them this morning for servicing. 

There is a huge chandlery here, the best we've seen since Las Palmas at the start of the ARC, so we've been buying boat spares and equipment for the various jobs that we have on our list. The team in the shop are real sailors: one crewed on Team Phillips, the ill-fated Pete Goss catamaran that dramatically broke up on a transatlantic record attempt a few years ago and he told us that they had no warning of the disaster which was all over in a minute or so - the crew spent 9 hours in the life raft. Bob, the sales manager, is an American who sailed here a few years ago and stayed and he's offered to help us with fitting a new seal to our propeller shaft - he's also offered us the use of his car today to go to the supermarket!

So, we haven't yet really had time to venture out of the environs of the marina yet but we'll do so over the next few days. The nearest town, Paihia, is a little seaside place with just a few shops and Whangerie is the nearest city, about an hour's drive from here so we're looking at renting some bikes to explore the stunningly beautiful countryside.

In the meantime, here is a selection of photos from the past couple of weeks:

 Above: Changing light, on the last evening to NZ

 Arriving in the Bay of Islands

Stormvogel motoring into Opua

Racing crew on Stormvogel

Farewell to the Trade Winds

Safely arrived in New Zealand!

We're delighted to report our safe arrival in Opua. As dawn broke we had the first view of the Bay of Islands and it's a really lovely place – ideal cruising grounds so we look forward to exploring the many anchorages here.

 

Last evening started well, with a lovely 3kg tuna landed (Stormvogel also caught one within about a minute of ours!) so that sorted out the 'what shall we have for supper?' dilemma. The wind continued to die during the night and then swung around onto our nose so we motored steadily into what for us were near-Antarctic temperatures; at 3.00am Graham even fired up the heating system and was delighted that it worked after 12 months' disuse.

 

This morning dawned sunny and bright so we really enjoyed the sail up river to Opua, especially as we were accompanied by dolphins for a while. The clearing-in process with Customs and Biosecurity was very painless and friendly and we didn't have to surrender many food items at all. We celebrated our arrival with Heidi and Peter and a couple of very nice bottles of wine, followed by tuna curry. We're about to move Maunie to her marina berth so will be able to step on to mainland NZ for the first time. We are so delighted to be here and can't wait to explore.

 

We'll add some photos in the next day or so but, in the meantime, are looking forward to some shore-based R&R. Meanwhile, back in the UK, Di's family are celebrating Freddie's christening; we'd have loved to have been there but will raise a glass or two to the young fella this evening.

Minerva to NZ, Day 5

Complete confidence in the temporary shroud – Stormvogel flies her spinnaker

 

Our position as at 07.30 (local) Saturday (18.30 UTC, 24th):

32 degrees 55 minutes south, 175 degrees 43 minutes east

Distance to go to Opua: 155 miles

 

Yesterday was a lovely bonus: as hoped, the wind shifted a little to allow us to fly our Parasailor from 11.00am till 8.00pm so we had a lovely sunny sail. As night fell, the wind (still from the north east) was becoming more fitful so we decided to drop the spinnaker whilst there was still light to see and start motoring again.

 

At just before 5.00am we met the forecasted weather front – a big wall of cloud and some very cold rain swept over us and the wind did a 180 degree shift to come back from the south east. Graham was on watch so go very wet sorting sails out but he hoisted the mainsail and, at the moment, we are sailing with full rig on a close reach making just over 5 knots towards Opua. Ideally we'd like to be a little faster as our GPS is predicting an ETA of 3.00pm on Sunday and we want to get in to clear-in with customs and immigration before they finish for  the day, otherwise we'll be moored on an offshore quarantine pontoon, unable to go ashore, looking longingly at the lights of a harbourside bar!  Some judicious tactical motor-sailing will be required we think! The lovely sunshine and blue sky is a thing of the past as we now have leaden grey skies and grey seas – just like sailing in the English Channel!

 

Today we'll be busy getting ready for our arrival. We'll sort through our food stocks and have a container full of food items we know will be seized by the customs and health team, tidy the boat and, most important of all, Dianne's going to trim Graham's hair which has gone wild.

 

All being well, tomorrow's blog will be written from New Zealand!