Author: richwest3

May 19, 2019

Our first morning arriving at the Te Ana Marina, we walked over to check out nearby Lyttelton. It’s a small town, most of the shops and eateries laid out on one main street with residential surroundings, the houses and cottages clinging to the hilly area above the town.

Since the town itself sits on a hillside, it’s a short uphill walk to the main street. Once there we found cafes, restaurants, shops, a pharmacy, and a nice market which meant we wouldn’t have to depend on trips to Christchurch for supplies or meals out.

We did notice the town definitely had a hipster vibe, making me think it would be nice to have a hipster disguise kit with fake tattoos, piercings, and big beards we could wear to fit in better. Rich joked the effect would be ruined by our matching jumpers (pullover jacket things). We’d just had to hope we didn’t look too nerdy. (For any fans of the show Portlandia, we felt like the straight-laced guy in this skit.)

Over the time we were here on our first trip, we had some great lunches and coffee in Lyttelton and always found what we needed at the market. There’s also a good farmer’s market on Saturdays.

After our cruise to Stewart Island, we returned to this area. Summer had turned to fall, and we found Lyttelton seemed to have a different vibe. It was quieter, more low-key, and the hipsters seemed to be gone—maybe they head to warmer climes for the winter? Either way, Lyttelton is a nice little town. –Cyndi

(Below, a few photos of the main street of Lyttelton and a few of the eateries. You can click to enlarge and scroll through them.)

May 18, 2019

(This post will kick off a series of rare current posts from Cyndi)

Because we arrived at Te Ana Marina well after dark and stayed put on our boat (Lyttelton Arrival), we didn’t really get to see our surroundings until the next morning. I felt like an excited dog getting let out to run around the park as I climbed off the boat and headed down the dock.

My first impression: Wow! Te Ana Marina is in a very scenic area, much more so than it appeared on Google’s satellite image. What stands out in that image is the shipping port and related businesses that surround the marina and make the area appear rather industrial. The real life view is very different.

The area’s most striking feature is the Port Hills, a mountainous range of hills that are remnants of a huge volcano. Golden grassy at the top, these hills become increasingly green on the lower slopes along which neighborhoods and gardens are scattered. These hills surround and partly encircle both the marina and the nearby town of Lyttelton, both of which sit in what must have once been the volcano’s caldera.

The hilly view continues as we look across the harbor at the huge, golden-grassy Banks Peninsula just south of us. The pier and shipping port, also inside the “caldera,” sit to the east of us, but we can’t see much of it from our slip. Boats and hills make up most of our view. Below, a few photos of the Te Ana Marina (click to enlarge and scroll).

Te Ana Marina has been open less than a year, which means everything’s clean and new, very nice for the boaters. This marina was also designed to entice locals to come and enjoy the waterfront. They’ve succeeded: big expanses of lawn, wide pathways, plentiful parking, attractive landscaping and sculptures, numerous places to sit, and incredibly scenic surroundings are drawing more and more people in all the time. This place just has a certain X-Factor that makes it a very pleasant place to walk around, look at boats, and admire the scenery, plus it’s a great place for kids and dogs to enjoy.

The main building is very nice but not yet filled with businesses. Meanwhile there’s a coffee and burger truck, and the town of Lyttelton (with numerous eateries) is only a 10-minute walk away.

Update: There will be no gym but instead something really exciting. The group that did Little High, a restaurant-quality collection of international eateries laid out food-court style, will open a similar place here in the marina building. Little High is one of our favorite places to eat, the food amazing. I’m sure it will be the same here.

We liked Te Ana right away, and over the time we’ve been here (a visit in February and a second stay starting mid-April) we’ve only grown to appreciate it more. Even after visiting South Island’s most scenic places, I’m still regularly struck by the beauty of Te Ana’s hilly surroundings. I’d say for anyone planning to visit Christchurch, don’t miss the Lyttelton and Te Ana Marina area!

As for the marina itself, we’d highly recommend it to other boaters. The facilities are clean and modern, and the staff, including Matt, the marina manager, and Xanthe (the marina assistant) are terrific. The town of Lyttelton with its grocery store, pharmacy, and numerous eateries is only a 10-minute walk down the street.

For cruisers who want to really see the South Island, Te Ana Marina makes a terrific base from which to travel. Cars are available here for a reasonable price, and once you have your own car, it’s easy to plan numerous road trips during periods of nice weather, a luxury you don’t have when embarking on the month-long, road trip extravaganza most cruisers end up doing from the north island.

As I’ve made pretty obvious, we’re big fans of this marina. After returning from Dunedin, we bought a car and have settled into a nice lifestyle here. The people are friendly and the pace feels easy-going. We drive to the city (Christchurch) nearly every day for lunch and errands, and while the fastest way is through a tunnel, we love taking the newly re-opened Sumner Road which winds up over the hills giving spectacular views of the Banks Peninsula towering over the milky turquoise-aqua water of Lyttelton Harbour.

We also enjoy taking another hilly route called Dyer’s Pass Rd., giving more incredible views of the inner harbor and of Christchurch. These near-daily scenic drives are such a treat. We’ve also come to appreciate the city of Christchurch as it is one of the best food cities we’ve ever visited (more on this in a coming post).

The road to Sumner…

Dyers Pass Road views…

The area’s lovely summer weather lingered well into the fall giving us many warm, sunny days. Increasingly, we’re getting cold days as winter approaches, and the temperature drops fast when the sun goes down so we keep our space heater running. Today we’re riding out one of the season’s first storms, full of wind and rain, which signals winter is around the corner. Since we’re headed back to the US for a spell and won’t be back until spring, we won’t be able to report what it’s like to winter over here, but we’re told it gets pretty cold.

Coming up next, posts about Lyttelton, Christchurch, and Dunedin.  I’m planning to have more time to work on the blog once we’re off the boat for awhile. –Cyndi

May 18, 2019

(A rare current post from Cyndi)

As promised, I’d like to diverge from the chronological posts and put up a few posts about our 2019 season in New Zealand’s south island. Only a small percentage of foreign cruisers make it down to the South Island in their own boats, and of those who do, nearly all remain on the north coast of that island.

When we explored that coast a few seasons ago, we saw only a handful of foreign yachts. This season, venturing even farther south to Chirstchurch, Dunedin and Stewart Island, we’ve only seen a couple of foreign boats. It seems we’re so far out of the usual realm that I can only imagine some of our perplexed fellow cruisers wondering where we’re going next: Mars, Pluto?

The common perception of the lower South Island is one of a wild, cold and windy place. After all, Christchurch is referred to as “the gateway to Antarctica,” Dunedin is considered to be very far south, and only hard-core sailors consider Stewart Island.

The reality, though, is different. Christchurch is equivalent latitude-wise (if you overlay the hemispheres to compare them) to Cannes, that city of sunny golden beaches, palm trees, and topless sunbathers in the South of France. I don’t believe anyone would think of Cannes as the “gateway to the Arctic.” The reason Christchurch gets its nickname is because it’s one of a handful of world ports that ships use before heading to Antarctica, not because it’s particularly close.

Dunedin, latitude-wise, is about the equivalent of Portland Oregon, hardly a representative of a far northern city. Stewart Island isn’t much further south than Dunedin. I guess what I’m trying to point out is that while sailing down here may be an unusual thing to do, it isn’t all that exotic as far as weather, temperature, or sea conditions. In fact it’s pretty much been business as usual.

So why is the south island so widely perceived by yachties and North Islanders alike as being cold and windy? It seems the news media may be partly to blame. Weather reporters love to harp on the most extreme weather in their country; so people hear their local reports and as an added item of interest, some snow, rain or low temperature event happening in wintertime South Island. Meanwhile, warm summer temperatures aren’t worthy of notice. (The same thing goes on with mainland Australia and Tasmania. We couldn’t believe the number of Aussies who were horrified to hear we were going to cold and windy Tasmania, not realizing that Tasmania actually has warm, mild and sunny summers.)

Not that there aren’t some differences between the North and South Islands of New Zealand. Generally upon telling native Kiwis just how beautiful we were finding the North Island, we’d inevitably hear: “Wait ’til you see the South Island!” Now after spending a couple of seasons in the south, we still think the North Island holds its own compared to any other place on earth. Yet we have to admit the South Island has an extra “wow” factor in much of its scenery.

Much of this comes down to a difference in scale. The beauty of the North Island can be found in its rolling green hills, calm bays with blue-green water and white sand beaches, incredibly scenic small islands, lush fern-filled forests alive with birdsong, impressive waterfalls, golden grassy hills covered with vineyards, distinctively volcano shaped mountains, and some of the oldest trees on earth.

The South Island has all this scenery but on grander scale with massive hilly peninsulas, large areas of pristine wilderness, fiords surrounded by high mountains and waterfalls, rain-forested hills surrounding deep sounds, glowing glacier-blue lakes, and the magnificent Southern Alps with their snow-dusted peaks.

In all, I’d say the North Island’s beauty is more serene, while the South Island’s scenery is more dramatic and majestic. There have been times here when we cannot believe what we are seeing: we stare and stare and still can’t believe it. I’m glad I like to take photos; otherwise I’d look back and think my memory must be exaggerating things.

One other key difference down here is the sky. New Zealand is called, “the land of the long white cloud,” but that is a more fitting description for the North Island. The South Island is subject to frequent northwest winds which create a phenomenon known as the Nor’west Arch. This brings some bizarre cloud formations that are at times swirled, roped, twisted, or distinctly disc-shaped like little flying saucers. The effect is especially dramatic at sunrise and sunset when these clouds take on vivid orange, red, pink and yellow hues. If this effect happens before a rain, the sky takes on the most beautiful shades of gray making a striking backdrop to the white flying saucer clouds. Down here in the South Island, even the sky is more dramatic. (Below, a photo gallery of Nor’west Arch skies in the South Island. As always, you can click to enlarge and scroll.)

Coming up, I’m going to do a few posts on what we’ve been doing this season and how we’ve found cruising and traveling around the South Island. (Hint: We don’t feel any need to go back to the North Island and the dark regime currently ensconced in Opua and Marsden.) –Cyndi

May 5, 2019

Well, if you read our last post, you know what happened to our old dinghy. Time for a new one.

No, that’s not it – too hard to get on and off the boat. That’s the 2003 VW Passat we bought sight-unseen from Turners Auctions for about $1500 USD. This would be our transportation to look for a new dinghy, and maybe for a little sight-seeing during the rest of our time in NZ*.

Off we went on a seven day road trip in search of the perfect water transportation.  Here’s the ground we covered – 1100 miles in all…

First candidate, a novel approach to boat-shore transportation…

This would provide a comfortable ride no matter the sea conditions and our cheerios would never get wet! We never did figure out how we’d run the necessary cables from Legacy to the beach.

The demo ride up the mountain at Queenstown was really nice, and what a view. We timed this trip perfectly. We left the day after a storm passed through, dumping snow on all the peaks. In the wake of the storm were warm temperatures and stunning sunshine through virtually all of our trip. The fall colors where still brilliant.

Next, a really fast, shallow draft dinghy we’d heard about…

It turned out that with its five inch draft and two engines for a total of 700 HP, it wasn’t all that directionally stable and kept spinning 360 degrees after heading directly at a cliff wall. I’m not sure the driver who was demonstrating the boat was particularly interested in our comfort and peace of mind! I think it would also prove difficult to get this beast on and off of Legacy. On the plus side, there’s plenty of room for groceries.

Then, a different approach…

This airborne tender might just be the answer. We took a test spin up the Fox and Franz Joseph glaciers. The salesman suggested that if we removed our mast, we could land on Legacy’s deck. I just can’t figure out where we’d store all that avgas?!

The demo flight was really great though with a landing (planned) at the top of the Franz Joseph glacier. This is the only way to see the glaciers right now as both access roads are closed due to slides. What else could we do? We had to see the glaciers!

Since all of the dinghies we looked at had major drawbacks, I guess we’ll just buy another small inflatable!

-Rich

*Hint:

Our remaining time in New Zealand? Here’s what we’re thinking. We just don’t seem to be able to get excited about any of our potential destinations for this southern winter. After seven years of continuously cruising, we feel like we need a little break. For that break, we’re flying to Hawaii where we plan to spend about four months.

We’ll come back to New Zealand in October, move back aboard Legacy and continue this nonsense, ah, I mean adventure. We’ll spend a month or two cruising around NZ while working on some boat projects and then head to Australia, maybe.

April 28, 2019

On the March 15th of last year, we bought a Maxxon MX 230 Air Floor inflatable dinghy from Smart Marine in New Zealand. We didn’t use it until we got to Fiji in June of 2018. We used it daily for six months while in Fiji and then not again until we got to New Zealand’s Stewart Island.

Before we left Fiji, the dinghy developed a leak – leaking water into the dinghy. This leak got worse and worse and plagued us all through our trip to Stewart Island, where being warm and dry after a dinghy ride would have been really nice.

The fabric glued to the transom delaminated from the wood, causing the leak. Smart Marine suggested that I might have caused this by installing wheels. In this video, I cut the dinghy apart to see if that’s really what happened.

Here’s a video that shows the tear-down…

In addition to the leak, the dinghy had another major problem: With the air floor installed, the center of gravity with two people in the dinghy was high enough that the boat was totally unstable. Each time we turned, we felt like we were going to capsize. We took the floor out and left it out after our first test drive. I think, contributing to this problem, was the small diameter of the tubes – only 14 inches.

(Note that we were using a small, light 3.6 HP 2-stroke engine so the engine weight or power wasn’t the cause of the instability.)

We bought this dinghy because we wanted something small and light, easy to get on and off deck and stow. It was that, but at too big a cost in comfort and stability. Never again will we buy an inflatable with tubes that small.

To give it some credit, those small tubes never leaked air. We pumped it up once when we got to Fiji and only added a little air once in the six months we were there.

I don’t think I’d buy another Maxxon product again, but in fairness, maybe one of their other models, without this silly, fabric covered, folding transom would be more serviceable. -Rich