February 17, 2022
It had been nearly a month since we left Auckland. At that point, we had a grand plan to sail around New Zealand’s south island with stops in the exotic and remote Auckland Island and Chatham Islands. Two and a half weeks later, we’d abandoned that plan and were heading back to Auckland.
As we passed Brown’s Island not far outside Auckland’s harbor, I thought back to the bright and sunny day we sailed off on our Big Trip. I was so excited and wondered what adventures lay ahead.
Now on this cloudy afternoon, watching Brown’s Island go by the opposite direction, I, much more weary, was still wondering the same thing: What adventures lay ahead?
At first glance this may seem like a sad situation, but our tails weren’t between our legs and we were in good spirits. We may not have gone far, but a lot had happened nonetheless.
Often when I look back on life, I can pinpoint a moment that changed everything. It’s usually not obvious at the time but easy to see in retrospect. In this case I can look back to the moment where our internet popped back after being out of range, and Rich told me the news that Omicron had gotten loose in New Zealand.
It still remained to be seen whether it would get a foothold; so this news in itself didn’t cause us to change our plans. What did cause the initial change was looking at a period of difficult weather. We decided to stop in the city of Tauranga and make good use of this downtime by getting some boat work done. This was a good decision as, for two weeks, we watched potential weather windows appear and then slam shut.
During this period, Omicron did get a foothold and spread rapidly. This meant, in essence, sanctuary in New Zealand had ended–we were as likely to encounter Omicron here as anywhere. Meanwhile Australia was preparing to open its borders. Now we had gone from having time to fill (which inspired this trip) to feeling the press of time as it looked like this would be our year to head out into the big world again. Suddenly it felt like, in moving south, we were headed in the wrong direction. We’d started feeling the call to go north.
At our first opportunity, we went back to Great Mercury Island, sat out cyclone remnants at Great Barrier Island, and had a lovely stop at Waiheke. Below, a few miscellaneous photos from this part of the trip, stuff that didn’t make it into galleries, mostly amazing cloud reflections from Great Barrier Island but a couple from Waiheke Island.
We did have some trepidation as we headed back into Auckland, the hotbed of the outbreak. Would our first “adventure” be getting Omicron? But we’re vaxxed and boosted and if we don’t want to spend the rest of our lives in hiding, we’ll have to start taking some chances and hope that fate will be kind. Meanwhile, we needed to make preparations to head to Australia, wrap things up in Auckland, and start getting the boat ready for an open-ocean passage.
I will mention one lesson learned on this trip. When we left, I hoped to do regular updates in this blog and add in more video. The fact we returned to Auckland in February but I am only now (in May) finishing posting about this trip shows I fell pretty short of my goal. Yes, it had been a busy time, but you know what? It’s ALWAYS a busy time.
It’s a fair amount of work to edit video, photos and to write posts, and we aren’t nearly on the level as those who really do a profession job with their vlogs. The fact is cruisers like Gone with the Wynns, Expedition Evans, and Onboard Lifestyle (our three favorites) have taken on a tremendous amount of work to do what it is they do, and we take our hats off to them. Even if we were to do a fraction of what they do, it would take too much time away from trying to live the life we’re posting about.
Rich actually keeps current, and our drone photos and video provide him with a lot of inspiration to post frequently when we’re out and about on our boat. I lag behind but sometimes diverge to talk about something current. We’re going to try some new things in the future; so we’ll see what develops. For now, it’s time for new adventures!–Cyndi
