May 13 – 20, 2022
So far we’ve posted Rich’s notes from our Predict Wind tracking page (along with a few of his favorite photos), our passage video, and now I’d like to add a few of my favorite photos form the passage, summed up in the gallery below, and some comments. (Click on any photo to enlarge.)
The gallery starts a view of Opua as we waived good-bye to New Zealand. Because we’d been so rushed and tired, followed by a less-than-friendly checkout (from the same official we had trouble with checking in near the end of 2018), we felt numb and relieved to finally be heading out instead of the expected tears on my part. We love New Zealand, through, and will always be incredibly grateful to have ended up here during the pandemic. We were very slow to take down our New Zealand flag, leaving it up for most of our passage.
The next shot is of Rich adding fuel to our tanks, the cost of choosing a passage with light winds. Then some of my favorite moments: motoring on a sea that looked like liquid glass, bright nights under a full moon with a few stars peeking out, and some lovely sunsets.
Our final night, after the moon set and it was very dark, we saw the amazing sight of three brightly-lit celestial bodies vertically aligned (I believe they were Venus, Mars, and Jupiter). They seemed to mark our way in through the pass into New Caledonia’s lagoon, especially when they lined up with a lead light on the south end of the reef pass. They were so bright, and a completely unusual sight–we’ve never seen anything like this.
Once through the pass, we were both up during the pre-dawn hours as we motored 3 hours across the lagoon to Noumea. First we had distant city lights, then the eerie gray of a cloudy dawn as we neared Noumea. Finally there’s a photo of a Noumea apartment building, lit by the rising sun, behind one of the private marinas. Noumea apartment buildings have a distinct style, often with pointed roofs and awning-covered balconies, that we find distinct and charming.
After some confusion and tying up at the wrong slip in the Port du Sud Marina, we finally got tied up in the correct slip, which would be our home for the next 10 days. Whew, another passage behind us! –Cyndi
Next up, a post within a post:
The Fricking Apple Juice
A Place for Everything and Everything in its Place. This is a wonderful thing to aspire to, not only in everyday life but for boat life in particular.
The challenge here, though, is that the hours before a cruise tend to be frantic as last minute things need to be fixed (there’s always something), linens and clothing need to be laundered and put away, fuel needs to be procured, lots of food provisioning needs to take place (with perhaps some pre-cooking involved), good-byes need to be made, plus many other niggling things too numerous to mention.
The best time to do most chores is in the weeks before a passage, but often they often get put off, then are rather overwhelming when the green light finally gets lit. Below, an example from our passage: The fricking apple juice.
I’ll start by saying that I don’t even like apple juice (and Rich isn’t a big fan, either). The reason I had it onboard was as an ingredient for a dessert recipe that I never got around to making before we left Auckland. Yet it was a full container of juice so I could never bring myself to toss it. I figured maybe I could give it away. I should have done this in Auckland but didn’t get around to it.
After we headed north, I never came across a giveaways pile in Russell or Opua. Still, I hoped to find a home for it (or maybe buy the ingredients to make that dessert although the main ingredient was pretty much out of season). Eventually I just learned not to “see” it anymore.
We did give away a couple of items just before we left, a slow cooker and a lovely lemongrass plant, but I forgot about the apple juice. So there it was as we headed to New Caledonia, on top of the counter next to an oven mitt that’s too big for the former mitt’s spot so also doesn’t have a place. I was too tired deal with the juice the first day, during which it fell over in the swells. But it seemed to happily settle where it was so I figured I’d leave it for the Apple Juice Fairy to hopefully magically relieve me of it.
Sometime during the passage, Rich needed to get to the cabinet behind the juice and moved it to a new place, where again it happily settled for the remainder of the cruise. Note that in the middle photo are other things (marked with blue arrows) that didn’t get stashed. On the left is a baggie of Kosher salt that didn’t fit into my jar but since it’s so rare in these parts, I wanted to save it. Then there are the cleaning wipes in the middle, but that actually wasn’t a bad spot for them to stay for the journey. On the right is a box of dukkha, a gift from a friend, but I hadn’t found a place for it yet and since it wasn’t all that in the way, I let it stay where it was.
It was on our arrival day that the apple juice suddenly appealed to Rich, who drank it all. So now on our counter sat the empty container until I could find out if our marina offered recycling. What a relief when I finally get rid of it.
Maybe now I’ll take a moment to find a place for that extra salt and find a space among the spices inside a cabinet for the dukkha. Sadly, I think I need to replace that lovely oven mitt as it’s too big for my hand and the old storage space where the dear-departed one lived. For the time being, I’ve learned not to “see” it so it might be there for awhile. –Cyndi
