April 11, 2013
The Coromandel Peninsula forms both a physical and mental barrier for the cruising fleet. The vast majority of the cruising community doesn’t go south of Auckland. In fact the majority of those don’t go south of Whangarei except to Great Barrier Island.
This is usually because of time constraints. Cruisers often leave their boats to visit their home countries, then travel around New Zealand by car. Add in the inevitable and necessary boat work projects and haul outs, and there’s not much time left for cruising. The cruising that does manage to happen usually includes the Bay of Islands, Great Barrier Island, and the big guns of the Hauraki Gulf: Kawau and Waiheke islands.
Few non-Kiwis cruise the Coromandel, and even fewer go around the far side of it to Great Mercury Island or to Tauranga near its base. Why?
1. Because few cruisers consider Tauranga to haul out and do their boat work.
2. Because few cruisers have even heard of Tauranga.
3. Because the towns of Opua and Whangarei give talks in places like Fiji and Tonga and heavily advertise their services to arriving cruisers. As a result, most people end up going to those two places; then word of mouth advertises them, too. They are close, easy to get to, and reasonably close to great cruising areas (especially Opua in the Bay of Islands).
Tauranga, on the other hand, doesn’t do much to advertise themselves to arriving Puddle Jumpers (the yearly fleet of 200 to 300 cruising boats crossing the south pacific) in Tonga and Fiji, maybe having a small booklet or two amid the glossy and plentiful big booklets from Opua and Whangarei. There’s very little in the way of cruising grounds nearby, and pretty much no cruising grounds south of Tauranga (on the north island). Rich and I only knew about Tauranga from our friends Colin and Jeanette, whom we met in Samoa. They build boats in Tauranga and talked it up so much we decided to go.
This is how we came to enter the cruisers’ Romulan Neutral Zone: the far side of the Coromandel Peninsula.
We woke up early and were relived to hear almost no wind noise. If there’s one thing you don’t want to hear before rounding a point or crossing a notorious channel, it’s wind noise. We had sleepy coffee and got Legacy ready to go in the pre-dawn light. Our plan was to round the top of the peninsula and head about 20 miles down the other side to Great Mercury Island, a place our New Zealand friends highly recommended. The total trip would be about 40 or so miles.
The trip went very well. It was calm, sunny, and warmer than the previous day. We were able to stay close to the shore and cut a few miles off our trip, plus get a great view of Port Jackson, a place too remote for any of our possible road trip itineraries. In spite of the calm weather, it felt like an accomplishment to get to the other side. We were now officially off the beaten path (at least for non-Kiwis).
The gallery below consists of pictures from our trip around the top of the Coromandel. Everything about this area seemed massive–the mountains, the foothills, even the rock formations just offshore. (As always, click to enlarge and scroll.) –Cyndi
