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Food and Water

by steve, on November 3rd, 2011 (New Zealand)

Yesterday was pretty much filled with fixing the water maker and eating well. I started the morning with cornflakes – the Kelloggs kind. You can get them in Fiji but they’re really expensive so we skipped them. Now we’re back in New Zealand they’re back on the breakfast table.

Next we tackled the water maker. I can’t replace the end cap to the high pressure tube without removing the water maker from it’s mount. This is a two person job and very awkward requiring arms to be bent around all sorts of corners to reach almost untouchable nuts and bolts. By the end of the morning we had the unit off and the end cap replaced. I did have to hire the car again to get some plumbers compound to prevent a leak from a compression joint. But by lunchtime we had a successful test.

Lunch was smoked salmon and brie on some delicious whole grain bread. Heaven.

After lunch we decided to go for a brief walk around the development here before returning to the water maker to remount it into it’s proper position. That took some more swearing and cursing and retrieving dropped items from the bilge but we made it. Job done. I did manage to get confirmation from Spectra that the new end caps were unlikely to fail so spares are not required.

Our evening meal was fillet steaks with portobello mushrooms and asparagus. And red wine of course. We treated ourselves.

Category: New Zealand | Here is my comment

Day trip to Whangarei

by steve, on November 2nd, 2011 (New Zealand)

Short of provisions we hired a car from the marina for the day. At NZ$20 plus fuel it’s not a bad deal.

Our first stop was Bunnings on the outside of town where we picked up some anti damp stuff which we’ll leave in the boat when she’s left on the hard.

Next stop was Norsand boat yard where we firmed up our haul out date – now set for November 17th. High tide is about 1pm on that day and that sets the approximate time of our haul. Finer tuning nearer the time. We also made clear our need to be placed somewhere we we can have crane access to the back of the boat for when we have the work done late Feb/March.

Next we parked in town near the Town Basin Marina. There we changed our booking to next week as we’re not in a rush to head up the river. We checked mail just in case and there was none. We then wondered around town for a while and packed in a fast food lunch which ended up less satisfying than hoped for.

Finally it was back in the car to visit a few vodafone stores to pick up a wireless dongle (done) and then visit the mall with The Warehouse in and the Countdown for food shopping. Being in the Warehouse took me right back to how we were feeling in April on our last day here in Whangarei before sailing north to prepare/wait for departure to Fiji. Where has the time gone?

Heading back the Marsden Cove Marina the drizzle that had been dropping all day turned into cold rain. Someone had not returned the marina trolley so we couldn’t get all our food to the boat in one go. We left that which we could in the boot (trunk) of the car and will fetch it when we return the keys this morning.

Overall it was pretty strange coming back to somewhere we actually know. We’ve not done this before to this extent. We did revisit a few places in the Caribbean but this is quite different. It almost feels like ‘home’ but only in some ways.

Today I will put some attention to the water maker and replace the end cap. We’ll be leaving the marina today or tomorrow. To be decided later.

Category: New Zealand | Here is my comment

Shore Life

by steve, on November 1st, 2011 (New Zealand)

Spend a week being deliberately woken in the middle of the night and you’ll soon appreciate a good, uninterrupted night’s sleep. Everyone aboard was in agreement with this. Sometimes you just don’t know how good something is until you lose it for a while.

Well rested we all got on with light work for the morning. Lissa helped Helen clean up the boat. I got on with sorting out our past tracks and photos and a few other internet based things that had caught up on us over the last week or so. I also managed to get in touch with our friends on Bamboozle who have just left Auckland and are gradually heading this way. We’re definitely adjusting our plans, such as they were, to meet up with them if schedules permit. We’ll learn more later in the week after they’ve undergone some fixes and the current bout of weather has passed.

In the afternoon Lissa’s parents, her boyfriend and past crewman Paul who is a friend of their family all showed up. We hung around the boat for a few hours chatting, eating nibbles and polishing off some bottles of wine they’d brought. We had a few laughs going over Lissa’s experiences of her time aboard.

It was sad to see Lissa go but this is the lot of us cruisers. Friendships made are inevitably followed by goodbyes. We may have a chance to visit them down in Auckland but right now we simply haven’t got our heads around what we’ll be doing the week before we fly out of New Zealand.

Back on the boat we watched a bit of TV while eating a bit of tuna before retiring for the evening.

Today we plan to take one of the hire cars here out to Whangarei and do a bit of shopping and maybe see a little of the local area.

Category: New Zealand | Here is my comment

Final Fiji/Passage Tracks

by steve, on October 31st, 2011 (Fiji, New Zealand, Tracks)

Here are the tracks up until and including our passage down to New Zealand.


View 2011 Fiji3 in a larger map


View 2011 Fiji4 in a larger map

Category: Fiji, New Zealand, Tracks | Here is my comment

Fiji->NZ: Day 7

by steve, on October 31st, 2011 (At Sea, New Zealand)

The wind did drop and we ended up motoring the last three hours into Marsden Cove Marina making a total of about 6 hours motoring for the whole trip. Not bad all things considered. After a splash of rain the skies cleared giving us a great view of the Whangarei Heads. The wind was cold but when we were out of it we felt the NZ sun burning through the thin ozone layer above.

After 7 days and 2 hours travel we found our way onto the Q dock at Marsden Cove Marina. We scraped our way onto it as a result of a cross wind and communications between us so a little gelcoat work may need to be done when we’re on the hard. We soon had the quarantine guy aboard who was very pleasant about taking a few items off the boat not allowed in. Next came the customs guy who handled immigration too. We still had a little too much wine/beer aboard but he didn’t mind.

So now we were officially in. The customs guy allowed us to leave the gate open while we checked out our assigned slip at the marina. With the cross wind we needed a good plan to get off the Q dock and into our slip. Having formed our plans, Helen stayed on the dock to untie lines and catch at the slip while Lissa stayed aboard to handle lines there. We sprung off the Q dock and made our way down into the marina to our slip. I didn’t quite like the approach the first time I backed in so I made a second attempt. We managed to get two lines tied, fore and aft, to brace us against the wind without bumping into anything. From then it was all fiddling to add more lines, move them and adjust them until we were happily tied to the slip.

INSERT_MAP

(Note – right now it looks like we’re in a field. Google satellite data is currently older than the marina. Sometime in the future this may not be the case)

Helen had wanted to open a bottle of wine on the Q dock but I hadn’t allowed it saying we had to get onto the slip sober. Now my desire to pop the cork was thwarted by Helen who wanted to clean the boat. So the outside of the boat was cleaned and I fixed the sliding door (Lissa helping each of us). Only then were we all in agreement and the cork was popped of the bubbly that had been placed in the fridge the day before.

It went straight to our heads. We deserved it.

By the time we’d polished off this bottle it was time to go ashore to eat. The meal was very good but it was a shock to get back to NZ prices for eating out. But that was ok, we deserved to get our feet on solid ground and feast it up.

Back on the boat we polished off the second bottle of bubbly while watching a few episodes of Extras which had us in stitches. Then it was time for bed. How nice it was to be able to sleep without being woken up a few hours later for night watch. Bliss.

Category: At Sea, New Zealand | One reader has left a comment, here is mine
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