January 24 – February 8, 2022
Rich was already up when I woke up, looking at the computer. Since he hadn’t gotten me up yet, I suspected our weather window to sail south to Napier must not look great. This turned out to be the case, but it also wasn’t out of the question. So, coffee in hand, we weighed our options with the weather. The bottom line was that it was a do-able trip, but it wouldn’t be comfortable. We were willing to live with the 24-knot gusts from behind us; it was the short-period swells on our beam that gave us hesitation. Also, this would be squally weather which meant, at times, the conditions could be rougher than advertised.
If we had been more determined to get south, we would have gone for it. We had a spot waiting for us at the Napier Marina; so if we could endure some discomfort for a couple of days, we could soon be sitting in sunny Napier, ready to take the next weather window to the South Island. But we weren’t that determined. In fact a few days at the Whitianga Marina nearby sounded like the more appealing idea. There turned out to be a problem, though: Rich called the marina only to find out they were booked solid for at least another week.
Now what? Sit here at Great Mercury for another week, at least? This didn’t hold much appeal. There are several anchorages on this side of the Coromandel Peninsula, but the problem was they weren’t good for this week’s easterly winds.
Rich said, “I have a terrible idea,” and I knew what he was about to suggest: Tauranga. The thing is, I have developed an aversion to Tauranga over the past couple of years. Yes, we’ve stayed there several times over the years and enjoyed it. But since the last time we had our boat there, a few things have changed.
First of all, we were simply just tired of Tauranga. It’s that feeling where something was once a part of your life, but when it’s over, it’s over, something you don’t want to circle back to. Second, between endless street construction and a growing population, the traffic just seems to get worse every time we visit there, and a drive to any given place is often a source of frustration and annoyance. Third, we no longer really mesh with the vibe of the area and increasingly feel out of place there, noticeable even when making a simple overnight visit by car.
All this added up to a big NO to visiting Tauranga. I have announced this is the cruise as one of “Things I Said I Will Never Do Again.” We now planned to do some of them; yet I wasn’t ready to go as far as staying in Tauranga. Before Rich could even finish his suggestion, I announced, “We are NOT going to Tauranga! No way, no how!”
Friends, we went to Tauranga. After refusing to go, I weighed our options. Tauranga does have a few people and places we like, although not enough to overcome my reservations about visiting the area. But now there was the Omicron element, and at this point it looked like the city of Nelson would be one of the outbreak centers. We had planned to haul out and paint our bottom there, but the fact is that our favorite boat yard in New Zealand, the Bridge Marina Travelift, happens to be in Tauranga. We could make good use of this down-time by hauling our boat there, which would mean we’d have no need to go to Nelson.
In fact, I got the idea that maybe we could now go down the east side of the South Island instead of the west. It would be easier to get weather windows to travel, and we could visit some favoirte places. We both liked that idea a lot; so I agreed to buck it up and go to Tauranga. The weather looked good for making the passage today, and we could get in in before nightfall. So we called our old favorite marina, the Bridge Marina, and they had room and assigned us a slip.
As we made our way to Tauranga the conditions were overcast, but other than that they were so good that this seemed to be fate, like the Universe was saying, “This is where you guys are supposed to be going now.” With 12 knots of wind aft of the beam, pleasant seas, and a current helping us along, the trip only took 10 hours, which was pretty remarkable. We had planned to anchor overnight but we made it to the Bridge Marina at slack tide, which mean we could go right into our slip. Below, a map of our approximate route.
And a couple of photos as we arrived and headed into the harbor . . .
As we approached we spotted our friend, Sean, waiting to take our lines—what a nice surprise! He’d spotted us coming in and invited us up to the bar when we finished tying up. Nice! This would be our intro to the marina’s new restaurant, Salinity, that had taken over our old hangout, Phil’s. We hadn’t heard good things about Salinity, but it seemed they had since become less hoity-toity and more friendly to the people in the marina. We went up and found that to be the case, and as a result we ended up hanging out there a few times over the course of our stay. And so, this era got off to a pretty good start.
The next day, we got a date to haul out our boat the following week and rented a car. So we’d be here at least a week, but we had stuff we wanted to get done in the meantime, including putting some Cetol on our deck railing (very similar to doing varnish). And it was a relief to see the any weather possibilities for getting south continually disippated, which meant we weren’t missing out on any great weather windows by deciding to haul out here.
And so began a period of emotional ups and downs. Our ups generally included friends and food. Of course we went to visit some favorite eateries and found, with the exception of one, they hadn’t changed and we still very much enjoyed them. We also had a couple of wonderful dinners with friends, including an American-style bbq dinner at the home of one friend and a dinner at Salinity with some others. (The Salinity dinner turned out to be one of those fun nights where you look up and notice the restaurant staff is putting stuff away and wonder why, only to realize you’ve been there until closing time.) We also got an overdue checkup with our eye doctor and got a couple of coats of Cetol on our deck railing. The haulout went really well and amazingly we were finished and back in the water within 24 hours.
In spite of these pluses, we weren’t feeling what I’d call happiness to be here overall. We tried to keep focused on the positive, but there was an ever-present undercurrent of negativity pulling us down, especially after we finished our haulout and there were still no weather windows in sight. New Zealand was in the midst of a weather pattern that was bringing lows from both the tropical north and the blustery south over its islands. We were starting to feel trapped and, increasingly anxious, we expanded our possibilities to include going anywhere else but here, but for the time being there was no way to go either north our south.
Interestingly, friends of ours who were a couple of days ahead of us made it to Napier as we were arriving in Tauranga and then managed to get to the South Island before we’d even hauled out. Were we envious? No, and maybe this was the first sign that we were losing heart to make this trip. One of the main reasons was the sense of time passing as summer seemed to be flying by.
Then there was Omicron, which thankfully got off to a sluggish start in New Zealand, but there were little outbreaks everywhere, including here in Tauranga. It was clear it would eventually be widespread so trying to avoid it would be increasingly futile. Omicron changed another situation in that it now put Australia back on our possibility list. We figured cases will be coming down in Australia while they were rising in New Zealand; so remaining here would no longer be as advantageous as it has been.
We decided that neither one of us really felt like doing the Big trip anymore. That decision made, we found a brief weather window to move north. We thought hey, maybe we could get a spot in the Whitianga Marina now. No such luck, though. So, we decided to head back to the Haruaki Gulf and do a bit more cruising there. We decided to tell people, “Did we say Auckland Island? We meant Auckland’s islands!”
Thankfully the window held up and on February 8 we were relieved to say good-bye to Tauranga. Below, a photo gallery that sums up our two weeks there (click on any photo to enlarge).–Cyndi
