March 26, 2013
We made the decision to skip a couple of anchorages of interest (Mimiwhangata and Tutukaka) to go to Great Barrier Island. Normally this would not be an either/or choice, but it was our first season and we were worried that winter weather could arrive at any minute! We wanted to make sure to get to Great Barrier Island while the weather was still nice. (We have since found that nice weather lingers well into fall.)
Great Barrier Island lies 50 miles off Auckland and is like the Shangri-La of New Zealand. It’s a good-sized island (19 miles long and nine miles wide), but it’s remote, rugged, and mountainous and has a population of less than 800 hearty souls. From Auckland, it’s a 30-minute plane ride or a 5-hour ferry ride to the island, and accommodations are limited. Its remoteness, limited infrastructure, and the fact that most of it is run by the Department of Conservation insure that it will remain a wilderness paradise. It’s “New Zealand as it used to be.”
Because we left from Whangaruru, it was a 65-mile trip. We got up while it was still dark, pulling up the anchor in the moonlight and headed out of the harbor just before dawn. It turned out to be a nice day for motoring to Great Barrier, but the winds, light as they were, were on our nose and our pace was slower than planned. It looked like we might have to break our rule about never entering a strange place after dark.
We had planned to go to the reputedly-beautiful Port Fitzroy area, but it’s not the kind of place you want to enter after dark. We decided instead to head to drier, more rugged and open Katherine Bay, then head over to Port Fitzroy in the morning.
We neared the island as the sun set, but a full moon rose from behind the mountains and the sky took on those beautiful dusky hues of lilac and blue. As we got in closer, the mountains started to loom around us, but we didn’t get to see much as darkness came on fast. We entered the harbor by moonlight and used our chart plotter and radar to find our way into the cove where we dropped our anchor. We couldn’t see much, but the smell of damp earth was fantastic. –Cyndi
