Two At Sea

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.

February 11, 2014

Our next destination was Te Kouma Harbour, less than a mile from us. It would only take 10 minutes to get there, but since we needed to run the engine awhile to make more electricity, we decided to motor around and take a look at the next harbor south, Manaia Harbour. It had been described as shallow and full of mussel farms so not a place we intended to anchor, but we thought it might be interesting to see. Below, a map of the area we intended to cover on our way to the next anchorage.

The morning was overcast and dreary as we left Rangipukea Island headed to the Coromandel mainland. We did motor by Manaia Harbour and it was as described: full of mussel farms and not appealing. What was appealing, though, was an anchorage nearby. We were heading for a small pass between the mainland and Tataweka Island (on map above) when  I noticed a beautiful spot: an indent of still, dark water surrounded by pine-forested mountains, looking both dramatic and peaceful under the moody-gray sky. I felt we’d been suddenly transported to the coast of British Columbia! It was pretty majestic and I was tempted to suggest we stop, but we were on a rather tight schedule at this point. So I said nothing as we continued on to Te Kouma Harbour.

Below, a few photos we took while motoring around, including the intriguing anchorage in the last photo (click to enlarge any photo in galleries that follow).

Our plan was to head to a spot called Squadron Bay, the popular second bay in from Te Kouma Harbour’s entry. But then we caught sight of the first bay, a sweet-looking spot with protective sandstone headlands, green-grass hills dotted with pohutukawa tress, and a beautiful white beach. It was so pretty that I could not imagine that Squadron Bay could possibly be better than this! A boat had just left, leaving just enough room for us; so we motored in and dropped our anchor. We could always go check out Squadron Bay later in the day.

The Coromandel Peninsula may be mountainous and rugged, but it has these Bay of Islands-like coves here and there. What I mean by this is they have pretty green grass hills dotted with beautiful trees and white beaches. The bays aren’t quite as pristine as those in the Bay of Islands, a more rugged version and grazed by cows instead of sheep, but they are very lovely. This was just such a bay. The unbelievable thing was that it didn’t even have a name. How can such a special place not have a name?

Update, October 12, 2023 – A kind reader emailed to tell us that it does in fact have a name: Dip Bay. She lives on a farm there that goes back generations in her family. They named all the bays around their farm.

We waited for the gray skies to clear into the forecast sunny afternoon conditions before heading out for a hike to explore the area. When we dragged our dinghy onto the beach, our wheels sunk into the soft white sand. Once we got the dinghy sorted, we took in the view. Wow! Visually, this could hold its own with any of the other New Zealand bays we’d visited, and it was about to get even better on our hike. For now, I’ll add in a gallery of photos of be beach.–Cyndi

February 10, 2014

After we returned from our beach outing, I was sitting in the cockpit, enjoying the scenery and the water sparkling in the late-afternoon sun. It was lovely, but I knew it would fade from my memory unless I figured out a way to make it stick, to “anchor the moment.” What to do? Well, pouring a glass of wine tends to be the go-to answer, something to do while enjoying a pretty scene, but it was early enough I didn’t feel like starting down that road.

I then had a great idea: I could go for a swim! Since I rarely swim in New Zealand, and never late in the day, it would go a long way towards etching this moment into my memory. So I donned my full-body lycra suit (warmer than a bathing suit and I don’t have to worry about sunscreen), got into the dinghy, and slowly lowered myself into the water. It was a bit chilly at first but felt good once I was in. In fact better than good—it felt fabulous to be swimming and gliding along in the sparkling water. (Below, a few photos; click to enlarge any photo.)

Rich came out to watch over me and get some pictures, enjoying watching me swim but opting to stay put on the boat. I stayed in awhile, finally coming in when it started to get cooler outside. At that point, jumping into a hot shower felt amazing.

Soon after we had dinner, we opened a bottle of wine and headed out to watch a beautiful evening and sunset. It was a nice end to a day made special by making a little extra effort to do something unusual.

Below, panorama of the anchorage in the evening light…

And a gallery of the evening and sunset…

–Cyndi

November 12, 2020

During our recent backup, we discovered these pictures that we liked so much that we just had to post them. The best I can say about the  exact location where they were taken is somewhere in New Zealand. I’d like to take credit for all of them, but the best just might be Cyndi’s.

-Rich

November 11, 2020

It’s once again time to create an off-site backup of all of our photos and data. This time, we’re going to copy everything to a 2TB drive and send it to our mail service in Green Cove Springs, Florida where it will sit until it’s needed (hopefully, it will never be needed). We always try to have at least one backup copy of everything in our ditchbag and one off-site copy, completely immune to typical computer tragedies like sinking 😉

In the past, we’ve uploaded everything to the cloud – Amazon Web Services to be exact – but I got tired of paying $30 a month for storage and we don’t usually have  bandwith inexpensive and fast enough to move gigabytes around the world. I tried to move our data to their less expensive storage level (Glacier) but didn’t trust that I had it working correctly, so it’s back to a variation of sneaker-net.

By the way, if you don’t know about it, Bvckup is an incredible backup program (that’s “backup” with an upside-down “A”). It’s about $10 to buy a lifetime license and it’s updated regularly.

With the way our data usage is increasing, the backup now involves two computers and a half a dozen external drives.

“Let’s see… did I back that one up yet?”
“I don’t have room for all that. Do I need it?”
“What the heck is this and why am I keeping it?!?”

That’s enough confusion to drive me to drink (though truthfully, it really doesn’t take much to do that these days!). -Rich