Russell

We’ve escaped Opua. It’s a hard place to leave as there’s always a reason to stay an extra day. But that thinking gets you stuck and sooner or later you have move on or miss out. Before leaving we did one final provisioning – enough to last a couple of weeks so we can be flexible as we make our way to the Whangarei area.

After lunch (pies) the weather looked grey and the were spots of rain. We almost thought “what’s the point of leaving today” before realizing we were close to failing to escape the Opua trap. We raised the anchor cleaning the mud off as we did so thankful we chose the deck/anchor wash option for Dignity. With light winds we motored the entire 4 miles to Russell. This was another good test of the new charger. The extra power was noticeable. It was cool to be able to see a digital confirmation of our net current flow and drive battery state.

We found a spot between all the buoys to anchor in the bay in front of the small vacation town of Russell.

Leaving Ben aboard to continue his work Helen and I went ashore to explore the town. There was a well recommended museum which we didn’t enter as Helen had left her reading glasses behind. This worked out well for us as we were able to use the time to have a fun-filled hike around the area.

We first climbed Maiki Hill to the north of the town where there were excellent views of the town and the Bay of Islands in general. We then scrambled down the side of the hill to the road that led north to Tapeka Point. We didn’t make it all the way to the point turning off to the western beach close by. Having seen a coastal trail marked on a map at the museum we had a go at returning via the coast. Personally I thought it was a lot of fun but it turned out to be quite a challenging section. The path was really only a low tide option and it was approaching high tide. That required a lot of scrambling over and around rocks and occasional wading. But we made it having the entire route to ourselves. We found a made path back to town towards the end which had us climbing up and down the hills again adding to our exercise.

In town we bumped into the Larabecks (fiddler/music professor) and shared company over a beer by the shore. We soon had to return to the boat for dinner even though it still felt quite early. We’re still not used to the long hours of daylight as a result of our latitude and approaching summer.