New Zealand

April 7, 2005

We arrived safely in New Zealand and DoodleBug seems to be fine. They will drop her back in the water on Tuesday and we will see if she still floats.

Annette and I are getting over our jet lag - we slept 13 hours last night! Today of course we have begun our To-do list. Tomorrow we should be sort of up to date and we plan to see if we can find Hobbiton. Everyone says the weather here has been great for the past two months but it was raining when we arrived and is still raining on and off. We have found our rain gear and sweaters on the boat so we are set for anything!

April 13, 2005

The past week was not our best. It started out OK with a fairly comfortable flight on Air New Zealand. The customs agents did not give a second glance at our four massive pieces of luggage, even though we admitted to bringing contraband Marmite into NZ. The shuttle driver we had booked, was waiting where he said he would be and we had an uneventful two and a half hour drive North to Whangerei. We had a pleasant lunch at one of the town basin restaurants and toured a fascinating clock museum. The lady who was in charge was very friendly and probably a little bored with the fact that the place was empty until we walked in. She gave us a great tour, which was reluctantly interrupted, when I remembered we had to meet the car rental company to pick up our wheels for the next month. The problems probably began on the flight from Los Angeles to Auckland, when the lady I was sitting next to, began to tell me how a monkey had spit water directly into her mouth.... No, I am making this part up - didn't you watch "Outbreak" with Dustin Hoffman etc.? Anyway, it probably wasn't Motaba strain Ebola that I caught but the night after we arrived, I started having muscle aches and began running a low grade fever. I have been laying about in the hotel room for the past week with the disease working its way between my lungs and sinuses trying to find a vital organ. Meanwhile Annette has been trying not to catch what I have but I am not sure that she has been successful.

The week has not been entirely wasted. For perhaps the first time in my life I have spent all Sunday afternoon watching sports on television. There are only four channels here and one of those is an MTV derivative, so its not like there's a lot of choice. The first hour or so we watched ladies netball. I remember that my sister used to play something called net-ball but it had left no lasting image in visual memory. I think that the first peculiarity I noticed was that they weren't bouncing the ball and running with it, the way basket ball players do. When the ball is caught, they seem to have one leg glued to the spot, whilst the other leg is still free to dance around the court. Then I realized that the nets had no back boards. The ladies were wearing short dresses instead of those silly "Mississippi prison garb / hip-hop" shorts that are de rigueur in the US of A. Further research has produced the fact that ladies net ball is very popular in New Zealand and has a big TV following.

For the next portion of our sports education, we watched the New Zealand car rally. This was great. The cars were predominantly Mitsubishis, Subarus and Citroens and they were driven at incredible speeds, sliding through the bends along narrow twisting and rugged gravel surfaced farm roads. Although it has been over 30 years since I was involved with "rallying", I noted that the top drivers are still the Finns, Norwegians and Swedes. The reason of course, is that these people have never seen anything other than a gravel road in their entire lives and they think the whole world is that way. This is the first time I have watched rallying on TV and discovered they now have cameras in the cars showing the interior of the car with the driver and navigator and also the view out of the front of the car. Annette found the latter disconcerting, since it sometimes wasn't obvious that the sequence had switched from the car to the pursuit helicopter. This made for some interesting corners. At the end of each days racing, the losing drivers would be interviewed and they almost to a man, blamed their slow times to their tire choice. "We should have gone with the Michelins instead of the Pirellis...", "We are using too hard a rubber... we should have used the soft mix like ...(race leader)...but we thought the moisture would clear up". What I noticed was that the most common cause of cars not doing well, was because they were on their roof in a ditch. Whenever this happened (fairly often) they played the interior shot of the car and you got to watch the driver and navigator jerking from side to side, while the view through the side windows is alternately sky and dirt with occasional tree shots, until the motion stops and they begin to kick out the windshield so they can get out of the car. Cool!

The final hour of sport was rugby but you know all about that! We watched various game snippets. The captain of the United Kingdom team was explaining to a sports reporter that Joe somebody, had not been selected for this season's game because he hadn't shown a level of fitness to play a full "forty minute" game. In another game, the New Zealand captain was knocked unconscious 4 minutes into the game. The remaining 14 players never quite seemed to get their act together throughout the remainder of the match....... We had planned on leaving DoodleBug on the hard for several weeks while we auto-toured. We have now decided to just get the boat ready and see what time we have available. On Tuesday we were lifted back into the water. The batteries were in terrible shape but the engine did start, enabling us to maneuver to the waiting slip. The 24 volt "house bank" was a different case though. I had to use some bow-thruster for steerage while backing into the dock. We were almost completely in the slip when the bow thruster batteries gave up completely. Fortunately we already had lines ashore and it was easy to complete the dockage. We are now moored in the slip next to "Pacific Pearl". Pacific Pearl was the sail we spotted at sea off Suwarrow in the Cook Islands last year. Our neighbor looked quite anxious as we backed in. As he had been hit and received damage from both of the two previous occupants of our slip, this was understandable. An hour after docking we had 9 replacement batteries delivered to the dock (I had ordered these via Internet two months ago). The problem was of course, that they each weigh about 68 pounds (31Kg) and 9 had to be transported to the end of a floating dock and then on-board, plus the original 9 had to be removed from DoodleBug on the return journey. The process took a couple of hours and was further complicated by the fact that the original batteries were swimming in about an inch of acid that had boiled out of the "sealed and maintenance free" devices. By early afternoon, everything was powered up normally and we surveyed the mess we had created with our luggage and groceries before going out to eat. Tidy up tomorrow!

April 24, 2005

About 10 days ago DoodleBug was floating again and moored in a slip at the Riverside Drive Marina in Whangarei. I (Ed) was still not feeling great and Annette only a little better but we fixed the fresh water system (clogged with sediment), adjusted the thermostat on the hot water heater, so that it produced hot water instead of steam and reconnected all of the backstays, so the mizzen mast would not fall down. (We had to disconnect the backstays to fit DoodleBug in the mobile crane / "travel-lift" that lifts the vessels in an out of the water). We could now take hot showers without serious risk of injury. By Friday we had also re-rigged the sails and the interior of the boat was beginning to look more "ship-shape" with the sail bags gone. By Sunday we felt like we really needed some minimal level of exercise and walked into town. The town center of Whangerei is pretty much dead on a Sunday but we found a franchise store selling "Famous meat pies". The previous day we had made a serious error of judgment and had stopped at a "Pizza Hut". In the past we had found that American franchise fast food is pretty much the same all over the world. Let me assure you that this does not apply to pizza. The first clue was when we were asked if we wanted fries with our pepperoni pizza. It went rapidly down-hill from there. Would you like extra barbeque sauce? I am sorry to report that Annette did not go for the meat pies either, although she would have been better off with the beef pie rather than the fish pie she ordered. I think Annette might be a food snob. We have been waiting for a shipment from Amel with some spare parts that seems hung up somewhere in NZ customs. By Monday it still had not arrived and for a break, we drove over to the small port of Tutukaka to see if we could find our friends on S/V Ironhorse. We did find Ironhorse but the crew Alfred and Rosemary were not around and we presume still in England.

Our missing FedEx package finally arrived on Tuesday and we ripped open a plywood crate that looked like it probably contained rifles or shotguns. It did in fact contain some repair fabric for the main cabin couches, plus a spare bow-thruster prop and fun stuff like that. As we were unloading this, Robert from "S/V Evelyn Roberts" dropped by to visit. He was last seen in the Galapagos last year. We had not crossed paths since, as he had sailed to Easter Island, Pitcairn and the Gambiers before heading to the Marquise Islands. Amel had sent some accessories I had ordered but no instructions on how to install them. I sent an e-mail asking for help and while we waited for a response, we decided to head out for a few days and do "tourist stuff". We first drove South of to a small town called "Matamata" and found a "Bed and Breakfast" on a "lifestyle ranch". We had heard about the latter before reaching New Zealand and as it was explained to us, a "lifestyle ranch" is a property large enough for the owner to have some livestock but not large enough to make a living from "just" farming. Lifestyle ranchers supplement their income with a job somewhere. The B & B we stopped at had a small herd of cattle (one of which was wandering around the front of the house as we approached) plus a pet sheep called "Fugley". We didn't ask why the name "Fugley" but we were told that Fugley was partial to chocolate chip cookies.

That evening we found a local restaurant and Annette enjoyed lamb shanks for supper. She said they were so delicious she was looking for Fugley on our late night return to our B & B. Fugley was unharmed but showed "its" displeasure by kicking our rent car as we left in the morning. We found a tourist information office with a circular door and a sign advertising tours of the "Lord of the Rings" movie set of "Hobbiton". We signed up for the morning tour and spent a couple of hours touring the farm where "Hobbiton" existed for the movie.

About half of the hobbit holes had been destroyed but "Bag End" remained and we stood under the tree where Gandalf had let off fireworks for the Hobbit children, we danced under the "Party Tree" and went inside "Bag End". It will come as no surprise to hear that all of the interior shots were made in a studio in Wellington and that "Bag End" was large enough to hold a camera crew and little else. It was a fun visit and the weather cooperated to make for a very pleasant day.

Next stop was the "Kiwi House" in Otorohanga. We arrived around Kiwi feeding time and got to watch two Kiwis being given their supper of whatever it is that Kiwi's eat. For those who don't know, a Kiwi is a nocturnal flightless bird standing about 18 inches tall (large chicken size) and they are nearly extinct. After seeing the size of the egg that they lay, I am not surprised that they are nearly extinct. The egg looks about half of the size of an ostrich egg and about three or four times larger than it should be. They don't appear to be too bright either, as they seemed to have difficulty identifying their food dish, even though they are fed daily from it. One local visitor dryly observed that the Kiwi is a stupid flightless bird and is the symbol of the New Zealand Air Force.

We stayed at a motel in Otorohanga that night and in the morning set off for the Waitomo caves. We stopped for a traditional breakfast and while Ed had the full breakfast with eggs, bacon, sausage, toast, tomatoes, potato cakes, Annette just had to try "spaghetti on toast". The days' gastronomic adventure was followed by the promise of an even more exciting day, as it began with us changing into coveralls and rubber boots before donning climbing harnesses and caver's helmets. We first abseiled down 150 feet into Richie's Canyon cavern. Annette has never before abseiled in her life and the hole in the ground into which we plunged was about 6 feet across and this led into a free fall 150 feet to the cavern floor. I have a photograph of her listening to the safety lecture and her eyes look as big as saucers. Needless to say, she did very well and even managed to look relaxed on occasion.

The cave descent was followed by a tour of "Skinny Joe's Hole". This is a cavern that they have only offered for commercial tours this year. The two of us plus guide, crawled through some very tiny passages and into an amazing series of caverns. Although caverns like Carlsbad Cavern in New Mexico are much larger in volume, in this cavern we had the experience we were amongst a select few of explorers. After changing out of our now grubby coveralls, we found a restaurant with a large sign that claimed "famous chicken and chips". We ordered a couple of beers and were then told they don't do chicken and chips any more and proposed fish and chips instead. No pizza? That evening we arrived in Auckland and checked into a hotel with a good view over the Bay. We had an excellent meal there, which made up for our truly forgettable lunch and in the morning headed over to visit the Auckland Museum. Monday is the 90th anniversary of the landing in Anzac Bay at Gallipoli during the "Great War" and is celebrated as Anzac Day here. It is curious that the Anglo Saxons observe and memorialize disasters and defeats such as Anzac day, Pearl Harbor day, Dunkirk etc. I had read that the 1917 war was the first time that national identity began to grow amongst New Zealanders and I was surprised to learn that there was and is, so little bitterness towards Britain over the fiasco of the Gallipoli landings. The museum exhibits contained comprehensive exhibits on the various wars that New Zealanders had participated in, plus an excellent section for children and natural history section. The section on Pacific Island and Maori culture was by far the most complete and varied that we have seen on our travels. We stopped for lunch at a Korean restaurant near the University. There is a large and growing Asian and Pacific Islander community in New Zealand and the restaurant we ate at was obviously a popular local hang out. Across the street was a Borders Book Shop where we loaded up with books for the coming night watches.

May 6, 2005

When we got back to Whagarei, the weekend before last, we found an e-mail from Amel containing photographs of how our accessories we had purchased should be installed. So began two weeks of getting stuff installed, cleaning, inventorying and buying spare parts, grocery shopping and so on and so on. It is truly amazing on how much stuff is needed to prepare an ocean going yacht for departure. During this period it has also begun to both rain and become colder, reminding us that the Southern hemisphere winter is approaching.

May 8, 2005

Position: 35 50.8 S 174 31.9 E

We are currently at anchor in Urquhart's Bay, about 12 miles from the slip at Riverside Drive Marina in Whangarei. We left the slip this morning at 0830 hours, just after high tide. There is about 10 foot of tide here and as we were on a tidal river, we had to be gone before 1000 hours or risk running aground. We slid out into the river and I had a momentary panic when faced with the first navigation marker in the river. It was red. Do I pass it on the left or the right? The wrong choice would run us aground even at high tide and we would face the misery and humiliation of accomplishing this un-seamanlike act within plain sight of all of the other cruisers in the Marina. The mantra in the USA is "red - right - returning", so that makes it "red - left - leaving". But....... the USA is the opposite to the rest of the world - so the marker had to be passed with it to the right of the vessel. Fortunately this worked and we wove our way through the meanders of the tidal river towards our destination anchorage.

We arrived at Urquhart's Bay at 1030 hours after a truly beautiful motor with blue skies and sunshine and actually remembered how to anchor. Urquhart's Bay is the last shelter before the Pacific Ocean. Two hours after we arrived here, an ominous purple wall of cloud approached from the South and a cold front barreled on by us with rain and high winds. The pleasant anchorage developed a nasty short chop and we retired to our bunk to read for the afternoon. We leave tomorrow morning and will sail up the East coast of New Zealand to Opua.

May 10, 2005

35 18.9 S 174 07.3 E

We arrived at the marina in Opua yesterday evening at 1700 hours following a very pleasant sail up the coast from the Whangarei harbor entrance. When we had serviced the anchor windlass at Riverside Drive Marina, we discovered that the clutch on the chain gypsy and it's associated shaft were damaged. We had the unit rebuilt and are happy to report that it functioned perfectly in recovering our anchor from the depths of Urquart's Bay in the grey of dawn. We motored out of the anchorage, rounded the headland protecting the harbor and sailed under full sail of Genoa, Main, and Mizzen for the first time in six months. We even dragged the Mizzen staysail out of it's locker and flew it for an hour or two. This is a great sail to play with, as it has bright blue, white and red panels. Very pretty. By early afternoon the following wind dropped as forecast and we continued to motor sail up the coast towards Cape Brett. The tip of the Cape is characterized by two small islands, the larger of which has a natural arch or "hole" through it. This is a popular destination for about a half dozen large power vessels bringing tourists from Opua. Normally we try to give capes and headlands a wide berth, since there are frequently strong currents and large choppy seas off their tip, not to mention the extra hidden rocks - but as we approached Cape Brett, we could see the tour boats passing through the "hole in the rock". We altered course to get a good view ourselves and noticed several of these large power boats seemed to be on a deliberate collision course with us. We finally realized that a ketch under full sail passing close by, was just as interesting a tourist attraction as the rock itself. We plan to be here in Opua for a couple of weeks as we do our final chores before departing for Fiji.

May 12, 2005

One of the remaining "problems" we had been facing was due to the purchase of a new technology anchor from a company called S.P.A.D.E. based in Tunisia. I had purchased the anchor via internet while in Santa Fe but upon arriving in Whangarei, discovered that the wrong anchor had been shipped. Several weeks of e-mail communication resulted in a request from SPADE as to where I wanted the "correct" anchor shipped to. We are due to leave New Zealand within the next couple of weeks and so NZ was not an option. I was attempting to locate a suitable address in Fiji, when a knowledgeable local sailor informed me that despite SPADE's protestations to the contrary, there is a SPADE agent in Auckland. I telephoned Grant McDuff in Auckland and he kindly offered to swap the offending anchor with a correctly sized one that he had in stock and then sort out the details with SPADE in Tunisia. What a deal! We jumped in our rental car and headed south to Auckland at first light on Thursday morning.

We found Grant's shop and gratefully traded anchors and then headed in the direction of a cluster of masts to see if we could find a boat chandlery. The Auckland waterfront must contain the highest concentration of marine suppliers in the world. We found our missing paper charts, Australian cruising guides etc. within minutes. As we headed north out of Auckland trying to get ahead of the diabolical afternoon freeway traffic, we decided we would hit every tourist trap on the highway. The first trap was the "Honey Center" at Warksworth where we bought honey wine, honey liqueur, honey and beeswax (to lubricate the companionway rails of course! The booze is lubricate other areas). They had plenty of live bees being busy and we decided to leave them well alone.

The next stop was Ransom Wines to taste wine and buy yacht supplies. We had passed "Sheep World" several times and Annette had made derogatory comments so I insisted we visit. We had missed the sheepdog demonstration so the remaining gift shops were pretty tame from my standpoint. "Sheeped out" we headed over to the coast to the tiny resort village of Mangawhai Heads to find a motel room and restaurant. We rented a cottage from "Big Ted" McDougal, the resident golf pro at the Mangawhai Golf club and then walked into the village to find a pleasant restaurant and recover from the truly bone crushing handshake supplied by "Big Ted".

May 13, 2005

This morning we returned to the pro shop to pay Ted for our room and admired the magnificent grounds of the golf course. The trees and greens were exquisitely manicured but since no-one seemed to be using either tennis racquets or Frisbees and I couldn't spot the windmill, we hit the trail again.

On the outskirts of Whangarei we stopped at the Ransome Winery and tasted more yacht supplies. We chatted to the owners of the vineyard and discovered that the winery and associated property is for sale (NZ$4,000,000 - around US$2,800,000). The view from the property out over the Bay was stunning but Annette decided that she prefers drinking wine to making it so we continued north to Opua and DoodleBug.

May 19, 2005

Opua Marina, New Zealand: Chores, chores, chores....We are almost done! Now if the weather would cooperate! There has been a series of low pressure systems moving off the East coast of Australia and passing over the Northern Island of New Zealand. These lows have been producing headwinds for anyone heading for Fiji, as well as rough seas etc. When the low we watching faded, a weak high settled in producing weak headwinds and followed by another low somewhere out there!

Our departure checklist is now down to items that say either "check" or "repack" - so that is what we are doing. I have requested a weather update from the commercial weather service we used last year "Commander's Weather" and we await their response. If we get a "go" we will leave this week-end. Of course it hasn't been all work. We have enjoyed "sundowners" or more correctly perhaps "raindowners" with Alan and Mary on "Imagine" (first met in Suvarov), Brian and Anne on "Farne" (first met Galapagos), Pierre-Phillippe and Cathleen on "Olla" (first met Galapagos).

Annette has decided that she likes New Zealand so much she would like to buy property here. We could be Cher's (of "Sonny and Cher") neighbor since she has recently bought some property nearby. I have discovered that the sand flies here like me a lot but my body doesn't like them. When I get a bite, my whole limb swells up and I have been popping anti-histamines and preceding my passage with a cloud of spray insecticide. Cher is just going to have to borrow a cup of sugar from someone else.

May 23, 2005

Position: 35 19.0 S 174 07.0 E

Today is the day! We will pick-up a scuba tank this morning that needed a refill, maybe pick up parts for our water maker, return our rental car, get Customs exit documents, refuel while fighting for a spot on the dock with everyone else who have also been waiting two weeks for a weather window and then head out! Actually, I need parts for our water maker. I ordered them 9 days ago and was promised "overnight" delivery. If they don't show up this morning we will have a problem. Next is the fuel dock challenge as I said above, everyone else will have the same idea of heading out today. The various cruisers we have met here are spraying out over the Pacific in all directions - to Australia, New Caledonia, Fiji, Tonga, Tahiti etc. The weather outlook is mediocre but the best there is at the moment.

The last low pressure system that had pinned us here, thrashed by yesterday with 60 knot winds at the head of the bay and 55 knot gusts at the marina. Ugly. A few hours later was light winds and sunshine. If by some miracle, all of this morning's tasks are accomplished, we will set sail this afternoon, beam reaching under gusting westerlies. We will be heading for Savusavu in Fiji and looking forwards to warm days again.