After a really nice passage, we arrived in Opua, rented a car, and spent nearly two weeks visiting our old favorite spots. It felt great to be back in beautiful New Zealand, one of our favorite places in the world.
As Rich stated before, we’ve had a change of plan and are making a long trip to the south island instead of a short one. This means we’ll spend the next month or so heading down the east coast of the north island.
This has given us a chance to do some things we missed during our first two seasons here, heading to some less mainstream destinations while making our way to Waiheke Island, were we’re sitting out some windy weather before continuing our journey south. Below, a few photos from our trip so far.
Now that we’re here, Rich will take over writing about our current travels, and I’m going to pick up where I left off in the blog and see if I can do some catching up this season. –Cyndi
Yea, yea, we know… there are too many pictures of pizza on our blog. So what! We like pizza! Here’s another.
What are you going to do about it? Huh? (Sorry, I get a little defensive about my pizza.)
This one was at wonderful Fenice Italian restaurant in Oneroa, Waiheke Island (New Zealand, of course). We came to Waiheke to get some protection from the wind that’s supposed to blow for the next couple of days. Also, for the wine tasting (there are 25 wineries on the island), the ice cream, and of course this pizza. We’ve been to Waiheke a number of times before, but it’s the kind of place we just can’t get enough of.
This bay can get pretty crowded. Luckily for us, there were only about five boats in the harbor when we arrived. By the end of the day, there were about fifteen.
This Google satellite image shows what it can look like during silly season (the day after Christmas until “Bad Treaty Day” (Waitangi Day) in early February). This image is dated March 22, 2008. That was probably the Waiheke Food and Wine Festival. Sounds fun, but I think we’ll pass.
Here’s what we’ve done since our last post with a map…
That’s what they taught the mynah birds to say on the island of Pala in Aldus Huxley’s book called Island to remind people to live in the here and now. (I love that book!) I repeat that phrase to myself to try to remember to pay attention and live here and now as often as I can.
It cracks me up that I’m out here in the South Pacific Ocean on a boat off the coast of New Zealand’s North Island and what am I doing? Searching newegg.com* for a hard drive. Is that living in the moment?
Shouldn’t I be paying attention to my surroundings? Admiring Cape Brett? Noticing the way the wind moves the boat and feels on my face? Appreciating the little sun that there is and happy it’s not colder?
I wonder: Am I really any less “here and now” when I’m shopping on Newegg? I feel like I’m very much in the moment. Not a moment of being at sea, but I am totally engrossed, for the moment, in the hard drive shopping process. I might even say I’m experiencing flow – aware of nothing else, not remembering the past nor contemplating a future that might have limited space to anchor in the next bay. During this time, I’m not worrying about anything and I’m not making any future plans (other than maybe installing the new drive in our laptop!).
Is it really worse to be out here looking at hard drives on my phone than to be staring off at the landscape? I think when I’m staring off at the landscape or the ocean, I’m more apt to worry about things to come and things that have been. I feel like people would look down on me for working on the internet out here. Strange this, kind of a reverse work ethic. “You should be doing nothing and not working.”
And to sail off on a slightly different course: It’s kind of amazing that shopping Newegg is even an option. Not many years ago, there wouldn’t have been internet waves out here. What an amazing world. I don’t know if the change is for better or worse. For me, better I think.
Better for us because this isn’t a day sail, a vacation, a one-time day-trip on a sail boat, but rather a way of life for four years now. If it were my only chance to sail beside beautiful mountains on a calm, blue sea, than it would be a shame to miss even a second of it. It’s not a one-time event for us… It’s just another Wednesday. I think it’s different when you are living this life rather than just experiencing what is our day-to-day world as a transitory event.
Yep, that settles it. It’s OK for me to shop on my phone. I give me permission. I’ll let you know how the new hard drive works out. -Rich
*If you don’t know newegg, you should. It’s an incredible place to buy computer stuff. www.newegg.com
We looked at both North Cove and Bon Accord Harbor on Kawau Island for a spot where we could ride out the front that’s due to cross NZ tomorrow and didn’t like the protection from the predicted western quadrant winds. Cyndi, brilliant researcher that she is, had a plan C: Mahurangi Harbor.
Mahurangi Harbor. Click for larger version.
This is, hopefully, just the ticket. Mahurangi is an amazingly large natural harbor with more room to anchor than I could have guessed from the chart, despite hundreds of moorings across from us and in another nearby branch of the harbor. It’s also beautiful with bright green water and lush vegetation surrounding us. More cruisers should come here!
This is a fully-functional Google map. Pan and zoom away!
And this evening, across the bay…
Mahurangi Harbor. Click for larger version.
We’ll hang here tomorrow, and hopefully continue the great Legacy NZ expedition of late 2015 on Monday, after the weather calms. In future episodes, look for Legacy and crew to move towards Tauranga for a haul-out, after indulging in all the Hauraki Bay has to offer (wine tasting at Waiheke included). Then we hope to continue south for some time at Wellington and points in between. After that, it’s across the Cook Straight to the top of the south island we’re we hope to spend the rest of the season. All that, or maybe just chill in Auckland until it’s time to go back to Fiji… who knows. -Rich
Our Anchor Waypoint:
36° 28.87′ S, 174° 43.11 E in 15 feet of what’s probably mud with tons of swing room in all directions and great protection from the western quadrant.
We always have our radar running. On the trip today, I noticed a radar return on our Simrad 4G radar and I couldn’t find the responsible boat. It turns out it was a kayak.
Kayak in the distance.
I’ve enlarged the part of the photo with the kayak – see insert. Here’s what his radar return looked like…
The kayak’s radar return.
I don’t hesitate to make mention of a product when it doesn’t perform as I expect. I am trying to do the same when it does. This radar sees boats much better than we can, in the distance, up close, small, large, and in calm and rough seas. It also does an excellent job of spotting squalls (and birds, plastic oyster floats, breaching whales, helicopters, and New Zealand’s Orion aircraft, for that matter).
They call this radar “Broadband” but please ignore the marketing terms. Marketers love to use words like “High-Def” or “Digital” or even “Broadband” but it is usually just the same old thing with a new label. For instance, “Digital” simply means that the signal is translated into ones and zeros at some point. Not only is that unimportant, but it’s not always desirable. It really doesn’t make it any better. “High-Def” is totally meaningless. High as compared to what? “It worked for televisions, heck, it ought to work for radar” says the marketing brain trust.
In the case of the 4G radar, “Broadband” might be appropriate in that the radar outputs a wave that sweeps from a lower frequency to a higher frequency, or a broad band of frequencies. By doing this, they are able to get amazing resolution at a fraction of the power used by conventional radar.
Also, most conventional radars have a watch mode or guard zone mode. In this mode, the radar usually comes on every few minutes and does a few sweeps, looking for targets. That was how our old Furuno unit worked. Since the 4G radar uses so little power, it can run continuously, always looking for targets to enter the alarmed area. I like this. Sometimes, especially in big seas, targets only appear every few scans.
I am continually impressed by the Simrad 4G radar. -Rich
(Not paid for by Navico, Simrad, B&G, nor any other affiliate company 😉
