Bay of Islands, New Zealand

30. Nov. 2015
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New Zealand
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1 Comment

Author: Pete

Location: Bay of Islands, New Zealand

You’d think things would’ve quieted down after the rally when all the rowdy sailers dispersed, but Opua was just starting up. We got a few things done on the boat that needed work, hoisted our newly refurbished jib, and started planning our time in New Zealand. So many bays and islands in the Bay of Islands (imagine that!); it’s almost impossible to see everything without staying a season up here.

We hitched a ride to Kawakawa, a tiny town down the road from Opua. Apparently it was an old stomping ground of Austrian artist Friedensreich Hundertwasser, who lived in the tiny town for twenty-five years until his death in 2000. He must have had some bladder issues, as his lasting legacy to the community were some fabulous public toilets in his signature style. He even asked that the vegetation dug up for the construction be planted on the roof. Brilliantly eccentric mind indeed. After ‘visiting’ the landmark we nosed around Kawakawa and found almost nothing else there of interest. Makes me wonder what Hunderwasser saw in the village. Maybe just a blank canvas to work on. We were markedly less successful catching a ride back and ended up hot-footing the twelve kilometers back to Opua. It ended up being a lovely evening walk on a railroad grade turned bike path, which toddled over streams and through green pastured hills. Even made some friends with the locals.

When all the necessary projects were done and we felt confident that neglecting the unnecessary ones wouldn’t endanger the boat, we pulled anchor and got out of dodge. Though we consulted weather predictions before we left, the three nautical-mile passage downriver to the next little town of Russel happily left little time to find ourselves besot by raging storms.

Russel, formerly Kororareka, has come full circle. The town’s original name in Maori means ‘Sweet Blue Penguin’, but received the handle “Hell Hole of the Pacific” in the 1800’s due to the debaucherous whalers who took leave and excessive liberties there while ashore. It’s ‘Russel’ now, and despite a touch of an identity crisis, it’s pretty much quaint and touristy, drawing crowds like zoo-going ice cream slurpers around the Sweet Blue Penguin exhibit. We even saw some penguins on the way which should’ve cued me in on the water temperature. But more about that later.

Thanksgiving stretched out for a few days like a fat and happy cat in front of a fire. Miranda and I made a small, pseudo-Thanksgiving dinner on Thursday and had a beautiful evening to ourselves on the boat watching the sunset. On Friday it was Thanksgiving back home, so we spend the day calling friends and family. Saturday we had plans with friends on a couple other boats to have a proper Thanksgiving dinner, so we descended with the crew from Georgia and Pau Hana on the unsuspecting Second Wind and feasted. Staggered around Russel for a scenic tour to walk off our distended bellies. Ended up laying in the grass.

Motorsailed another three miles to Robertson Island, also called Motuarohia. I always wondered how anthropologists knew where and when early peoples moved around. Apparently New Zealand was populated not from Australia or even Fiji, but from Tahiti! The connection can be seen in the native languages which are pretty similar. The names of all the islands here start with ‘motu’, which means island in Maori and also in Tahitian! Same with va’a and waka which is canoe in Tahitian and Maori, respectively; the k and the glottal stop make the pronunciations very similar and both starting sound taking on more of an f-sound. Tracing these language similarities is one of the means for mapping the flow of human migration. Pretty neat. We hiked around Motuarohia, up to a pa site, a primitive fortification to ward of sieging neighbors. Not much was left of the site, but the view was excellent.

Red shows migration 30,000 years ago; green 3,000; maroon 2,000; and dark blue 1,000 years ago.

Speaking of primitive, rock oysters are everywhere down here. They cling to almost all rocky seashore you’ll find. Following as the locals do, we pried a few off and brought them home for dinner! I was just hamming it up with the faces; they were slurp-risingly good! Enough butter, lemon, and parmesan make even the most repugnant bivalve delectable!

I broke out the heavy suits, hoods, gloves and went to check out the underwater flora and fauna. Lots of kelp, shellfish, and rocks. Reaching down to pick up a cockle shell out of pile, I was startled to see a large monochromatic iris dilate to look at me. The octopus poofed out his skin to make it look spiky and changed from brown to orange. It did the job, and I backed off. In an hour of snorkeling I had seen five of them. I love calamari and liked octopus when I’ve had it before, but I can’t bring myself to catch (read: impale on a harpoon) any of them. I’ve read accounts of them sneaking out of their tanks in captivity to eat fish in other tanks at night, then pop back into their tank and look innocently out in the morning. There’s also account of them ripping the stinging tentacles off jellyfish and using them to hunt their own prey. Don’t just take my word for it, check out Inky’s story. That kind of smarts deserves a pass. Plus they’re scary looking.

The cold water and warming summer air make for some great fog banks in the mornings. As we sailed three more miles over to Urupukapuka we ran the radar looking for other boats in the mist. Fabulous hiking and a great name? What’s not to like about Urupukapuka?

Another thing to love is the scallop beds! In an hour of free diving I gathered a dozen scallops and five green-lipped mussels. They lie in shallow depressions on the bottom with a light covering of silt for camouflage. It’s not too hard to see and pick them up, but they are wilily and open and close rapidly to jump out of your hand and then can actually swim away from you with jets of water! Cleaning them isn’t difficult, though it’s off-putting to have the ones awaiting shucking start clapping and spitting water out of the bucket. “Let me out!” Alas, ’twas not to be. There was ‘streaky bacon’ in the fridge, waiting to be wrapped around the scallops like an octopus tentacle around an unsuspecting wader’s ankle. Into the oven with ye!

We’re out of the Bay of Islands to run down the coast towards Whangarei as soon as we stop feeling like beached whales and can stand again!

Opua, New Zealand

21. Nov. 2015
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New Zealand
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1 Comment

Author: Pete

Location: Opua, New Zealand

It’s been an adjustment to get our thin blood used to the cooler climes of New Zealand spring. We spent a few days in a slip at the Bay of Islands marina in Opua. There isn’t much of town here, the marina drew a tiny grocery store, a restaurant, and two dozen businesses specializing in keeping the boats that ply these waters off the bottom. The Bay of Islands is roughly one hundred and fifty square miles of coves and islets, a true mariner’s paradise. Green hills shine in the sun after rain squalls rip through and blend with the aquamarine of the bay like a patchwork quilt. The visibility of the water certainly isn’t as clear as we’re used to, but I suppose neither am I. Can you spot us?

We’ve been reconnecting with nature’s solid form with walks along the rocky shores and later when my legs remembered themselves, runs into the hills. I had to give them a little pep-talk. And promises of ice-cream. That’s what really did the trick!

This is the season when tropical storms start to menace the South Pacific islands like wolves around quivering sheep. Boats from Fiji, Tonga, and New Caledona make the often punishing passage to New Zealand because it beats the alternative of bracing on a hunk of coral and taking a typhoon in the face. New Zealanders have made the colonizers welcome, especially in Opua, the northernmost and favored landfall port for the influx. The Bay of Islands Marina here throws the All Points Rally for the occasion, a week-long fete with seminars, events, food, and libations. Of course libations! Rallies aren’t usually our scene, but we were working on several boat projects and ended up swirling in the tide pools with the old salts, many of whom we’d met throughout the Coconut Milk Run. Nice to catch up with old friends and swap tall tales with obligatorily exaggerated wave height, wind ferocity, and fish size.

The seminars were helpful and varied. Miranda and I sat in on a sail repair demonstration and ended up winning a full sail refit! We won by dumb luck; it sure wasn’t an award for most attentive participant! Why are teachers always the worst students? Doodling in class! I say!

In the cold of the morning, steam materializes like an apparition from the bay’s waters and haunts the anchorage until the sun burns through in the afternoon. When the chill gets a bit too sharp we fire up the alcohol stove which takes the bite off the air. If that fails it’s French onion soup, flame broiled with a blow torch! That’s sure to heat things up!

Capricious clouds ambush scenic picnic and work detail alike with blustery squalls. Still, it’s a welcome change to arguably be back in the real world where tomatoes need not be guarded jealously like an ogre’s hoard. New Zealand has plenty to offer, regardless of how one seeks happiness.

Passage to New Zealand: Day 10 – 11 and Landfall

09. Nov. 2015
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New Zealand, Passages
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2 Comments

Author: Pete

Location: 34°38.261S’ 173°43.365E’

Date: Nov 7 – 8, 2015

Day 10 – 11 at sea.

Winds from the south-southeast imposed a westward course upon us for two days as a trough blew over, pushing us more west than we would have wanted. Velocity Made Good (VMG) is a nautical measure of how fast you’re going in the actual direction of your waypoint based on speed, distance to target, and a little trigonometry. It doesn’t particularly matter if you’re rocketing at eight knots heading east if your destination is west, right? For two days our VMG oscillated between 0.5 and -0.7, meaning that we were going places, but often it was away from New Zealand. Yikes. Our wayward westing allowed us to later catch the favorable southwest winds which would zip us in to New Zealand after the front muscled through. Long story short, we’ve been pretty happy in the recent days sailing a beam reach southeast at a rejuvenating clip and enjoying our last days offshore.

The temperature has been dropping steadily as our latitude increases and is especially notable on night watches. Even curled up in the salon with a blanket and a mug of tea while keeping a lookout through the windows, the damp of the sea can put a chill in one’s bones. I’m becoming convinced that we’ve sailed right past New Zealand and are quickly approaching Antarctica. Miranda and I have been layering all the long pants, sweatshirts, and socks we can find. With our patchwork garb, stumbling locomotion about the boat, and itinerant living habits we might not be out of place on a New York City street with the folks screaming at passing cars. It’s a glamorous life on the sea.

The morning of the 8th dawned clear with light winds. In the late morning the jagged spine of North Cape rose slowly out of the sea to the west. Almost as if on cue the wind kicked up to twenty knots on our beam and we hurried the last hundred miles at a happy clip as sea birds swooped welcome loops around the boat. The scent of land greeted us forty miles out, light but distinct to our noses, acclimatized to the olfactory-neutral open ocean. At twelve miles out we hoisted the yellow quarantine flag, which indicates that you need to clear in with customs and aren’t trying to sneak in like bandits in the night. And night it quickly became. The sun dove behind the bulk of New Zealand spattering the cloud layer in reds and golds. As we approached the entrance to the Bay of Islands the conglomeration of pummeled seashore and rainy sheep pasture wafted over us and invoked memories of a year of bivouacking on the windswept coast of Ireland many moons ago. A young seabird hitched a ride in to port, plunking himself unceremoniously on deck for some shut eye.

The moonless and overcast night offered no aid in ducking the few freighters, navigating the ten miles into the bay, amidst the shallows, and up the Opua River to the customs dock. Land, sea, and sky blended together in charcoal gray and wood smoke hung in the air. Though dead tired, an hour nap before pulling into the bay and a cup of tea renewed us both, and picking our way through the beacons proved straightforward with a lookout on the bow. Moored vessels slid past in the mirrored water like specters as we motored up the river in a glow of blue-green seafire. On the 2AM slack tide we sidled up to the Q-dock, Cowgirl Miranda lassoed a cleat, and we wrangled Tayrona into her berth. I don’t even remember going below to rack out. Happy to be in New Zealand!