April 19, 2016
Rich here. I was thinking about the pros and cons of cruising the Marlborough Sounds and ended up in a lengthy discussion with myself – almost an argument really. Here are some excerpts from that psychotic break…
“It’s beautiful. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.”
“Lots of places are beautiful. What about the Bay of Islands, or the Hauraki Gulf?”
“The Sounds has it’s own kind of beauty. As beautiful as anything we’ve seen, or maybe even more so.”
“Ok, if I loved sailing, this wouldn’t be a great place. We motored the whole time we were there – didn’t sail once. When there was wind, it was inconsistent – blasting down from the mountains.”
“Yea, but I love calm water, and I don’t mind motoring at all. The Sounds are a massive expanse of calm water – almost like an inland sea.”
“But I also love eating and there were lots of great little lodges that served great meals.”
“Those lodges were kind of pricey.”
“We’ll you could have fished. It’s probably good fishing.”
“But I don’t like cleaning fish. I also don’t like the cold!”
“It wasn’t that cold. Sure, when there are southerlies, it gets cold but not much colder than the rest of New Zealand. I think we only ran our heater two or three times.”
“The anchoring was difficult!”
“It wasn’t that hard. We were almost always able to anchor where we wanted. It was a little deep. We had to tie to shore once.”
“Well truthfully, we didn’t really have tie to shore. We just wanted to be close to the beautiful, forested cliff bordering the deep, green water.”
“But there were always those stupid Combined Club moorings. Often, when there would have been a shallow place to anchor, they put a mooring in the way.”
“We could just pick up the mooring and tie up to it.”
“You’re not supposed to if you’re not a member. Membership is about $300. For the three times we used the moorings, that pretty pricey.”
“No one seemed to care if we just picked on up.”
“Yea, but I felt guilty, using their mooring without paying.”
“If they put them in my way, than they can expect me to use them – so there!”
“Speaking of things in the way, what about all the floating logs. You always had to be on the alert.”
“That was only when we were entering the Kenepuru Sound. There weren’t many elsewhere. But it was hard to navigate, with the poor quality of the charts. I always thought every inch of NZ was accurately charted. Not so with the Sounds.”
“Yea, they weren’t very good. Neither NZ Mariner, CM93 or Navionics. It did seem like they were taken from Cook’s original sketches. But the water was deep and we would have really had to work to hit anything. Just staying a little ways from shore, with the depth sounder reading over 100 feet or more, made me pretty comfortable.”
“I guess I could have used more satellite KAP files.”
“How? The satellite images in the Sounds weren’t very good and the internet was terrible.”
“I wouldn’t say terrible. Just spotty. There were lots of places where we had internet via cell service and the lodges often had WiFi. Besides, you wanted to get away from the crowd. You should be glad that they don’t have internet in the wilderness.”
“And we did get away from the crowd, but only because of the time of year we cruised the Sounds. It can get really crowded in Silly Season (Christmas through the first week in February). It can also get busy on holidays and even nice weekends.”
“That didn’t bother us. We were often in Picton or Havelock, tied up to a dock during those times. It was easy to get a berth and easy to reprovision. There was also good (and inexpensive) food at the restaurants in Picton and Havelock!”
Would I do it again? Was it worth the effort to get Legacy down to the South Island? Would it have been better to stay at Waiheke Island and visit Man-O-War vineyard every day?
Yes, I would do it again – at least I’m pretty sure I would. Cyndi wouldn’t hesitate to shout “Yes” to that question. She might have liked it a little more than I did. I think I’m more of a tropical scenery person, but even so, it was amazingly beautiful and a great cruising ground. I guess I would say that it would be a shame to come all the way to NZ and not cruise the Sounds. -Rich
