April 13, 2013
Our next and final stop in New Zealand was Tauranga. We’d already visited the area by car and decided this was where we wanted to haul our boat for maintenance and live for a few weeks before heading to Fiji. Tauranga has it all: a warm sunny climate, a nice marina with a good boatyard, fantastic boating facilities, two wonderful towns (Tauranga and Mount Maunganui), lots of eateries, beautiful scenery, miles of beaches, big grocery stores, great hiking, and it’s relatively close to some of New Zealand’s top sightseeing destinations.
There’s one complication with going to Tauranga: a long strip of land mostly encloses the coastline and the harbor, leaving only about a 1/4-mile wide entrance into the area. This means the tide really rips through here, and you have to time your entrance for incoming or slack tide. The marina, 2 miles from the harbor entrance, needs to be entered at slack tide only. Otherwise there’s just too much current ripping through there to maneuver a boat into a slip. Below, a map showing Pilot Bay and the Tauranga Bridge Marina.
We decided to make it easy on ourselves and just worry about getting into the harbor, anchor overnight in Pilot Bay just inside, then go to the marina the following day.
We began our 63-mile journey under a night sky so starry it provided enough light to spot the numerous rock islands we passed. It was cold when we headed out, but by midday it became surprisingly hot. Apparently summer wasn’t ready to fade out just yet.
We entered the harbor easily, but what a busy place! Boats where everywhere, zipping all around us and making wakes or stubbornly anchored and fishing in the channel, and a pilot boat and freighter were coming in behind us. Summer was still in full swing here, especially on this weekend day! We pulled around the corner and made our way through the kayaks, launches, skiffs, anchored dinghies, and large wakes from the pilot boat and freighter to anchor. We found a good spot, but with all the wakes it was a rolly anchorage.
By now, the combination of not much sleep and the culmination of six weeks of active cruising had left us pretty drained, and we didn’t even consider going ashore. We were both so tired that we slept soundly even though the boat wakes continued into the night. –Cyndi
