Category: Uncategorized

December 21, 2020

Now that we have a drone, we’ll probably post a lot more about even mundane anchorages as the aerial shots make every place look amazing. That’s the case here. It was a good enough anchorage, though a little rolly, and it was pretty enough from the water, but from the air, it looked amazing.

Please click on the images below and scroll through them to enjoy the full majesty of this little Mavic Air 2 drone’s pictures.

I think the roll probably came from the endless parade of boats passing buy in the distance. We were there on a Saturday in the summer. Maybe it would be better on a weekday. The holding was good and we had the bay to ourselves when we first arrived. A couple hours later there were three other boats, one of which was anchored in the typical Kiwi fashion: way too close to us!

With the ever-increasing number of cruisers with drones and the great pictures and video from those drones on the net, I think we need to take this as a lesson. Maybe there should be a warning label that says:

“The view form the air makes all locations appear ten times prettier than they actually are.”

I don’t mean to make this sound like it wasn’t a pretty anchorage because it was. Would I recommend it to a close friend that had only one week to cruse New Zealand? Absolutely not.

Here’s exactly where we’re talking about. (You can move around in the map below and zoom in and out.)

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-Rich

February 11, 2014

From the beach we set off on our hike, starting with a climb up the grassy hill until we located the trail. These types of walks look deceptively easy, a pleasant climb up a grassy slope. But beneath the grass the ground can be uneven, a combination of old paths formed by livestock and, mostly likely, petrified cow patties. It wouldn’t be hard to turn an ankle on this sort of climb; so it’s always a relief to get to a beaten path.

As we climbed higher, we enjoyed the changing views of our anchorage and the impressive view once we reached the trail near the top of the ridge. Below, a gallery of photos…

Plus panoramas of our beach, the outer part of our bay, and the entire bay…

As we made our way further into the harbor area, we found ourselves surrounded by Middle Earth-like scenery full of lumpy green grass hills, scattered small boulders, and large, gnarled trees. I felt like we’d found the Shire from the Lord of the Rings movies! In all our time in New Zealand we’ve never seen a landscape quite like this. Below, a gallery of photos from our walk (click to enlarge any photo in the galleries).

We continued walking all the way to Squadron Bay, admiring stunning views of beautiful Te Kouma Harbour and enjoying the chirping cicadas, nature’s frequent soundtrack during summer afternoons in New Zealand. Below, a couple of panoramas of Te Kouma Harbour.

And a photo gallery of the harbor as we neared Squadron Bay, pretty in a mountainous, pine forested way. We weren’t sure, but maybe we’d bring the boat over there in the evening.

Meanwhile, we enjoyed the walk back to our bay. This turned out to be quite a special hike.–Cyndi

December 19, 2020

On our way out to the Haruaki Gulf for a little cruise, we saw this guy, also headed out…

We let him pass us. We were sandbagging.

Seriously though, just imagine how fast Britannia, the British America’s Cup boat, would go with sails up?!

They were being towed out to the racecourse for day two of the first series leading up to the 2021 America’s Cup races.

-Rich

December 16, 2020

2020 just keeps giving as there are now two cyclones in the tropics: Yasa approaching Fiji and Zasu over Tonga. What’s next?

We’re watching with particular interest as a few months ago, we’d decided to head to Fiji. Then, it looked like we’d be able to go on to PNG and Indonesia before cyclone season. When it became apparent that those countries would remain closed due to Covid and we’d have to spend cyclone season in the tropics, we did an about-face. Cruising seems like a big chess game and sometimes we make the right move.

(The above image was inspired by one Cyndi saw on Facebook. I just had to make my own.)

-Rich

December 9, 2020

My friend Tom emailed me this…

Hi Rich, have you seen any of the AC boats sailing around? They look pretty impressive. 

Here’s my response…

No, there aren’t really many AC boats here. Most are 12 volts DC, the same as in the US. The few AC boats here are 240 volts, 50 Hz.

Oh, wait?

Did you mean America’s Cup? Well, then yea, we see them. The AC bases are about a 5 minute walk from us. We see them launching regularly. We don’t really see them sailing though. They tow them out to the Hauraki Gulf for practice. When they tow them, they foil at about 25 knots towed behind RIBs with three or four giant outboard engines. We saw them out sailing in the distance when we went out to the Gulf but not close enough to be exciting.

In fact, I’m having a hard time getting excited at all about the cup. These are no longer boats but rather very low flying airplanes. The teams, especially the American team, aren’t very friendly. They frequent our coffee stand so we see them all the time, but they have this mistaken notion that they are the sailing elite. Being sailing elite ourselves, we find this hysterical. 😉

We saw both American Magic’s boat and the British boat going in the water today while we had lunch. The only other challenger here are the Italians (Prada). And of course, there’s Team New Zealand. You can tell them by the big United Arab Emirates signs everywhere. You can tell the American boat by the great big sign for a French aircraft manufacturer (Airbus). The British team is Ineos or something like that. I have no idea what that is.

Also, there are very few people with American accents on the American team. Most seem to be Australian or Kiwi.

So in summary, the not-really sailboats are operated by multinational advertising conglomerates, staffed by crew from around the world, as long as they can be snooty, work for less than minimum wage and still manage to act like they’re better than everyone else.

Note: I looked up Ineos while posting this. They are apparently a chemical company. I found the following statement on their website very funny…

Most of our employees have spent all their working lives in the chemical or oil industry. We continue unashamedly to extract best practices from this very impressive group of people in all spheres of activity.