Going

A week brings us round trip from Whangarei Heads to Great Barrier Island and back, and back from our serendipitous holiday from internet access.

We compared notes on favorite parts of 2013 at dinner today, and we had quite a list to choose from.  Alisa was keen on Minerva Reef and Tonga, with the passages in and out of Minerva making her "least favorite" list.  The Aucklands were my fave for the year past, with a nod to Port Davey, where we started the year off.

Hauraki Gulf

Last day of 2013

It's all completely hectic, of course - keeping the boat up, and sailing the damn thing all over the place ("Just because we do this all the time, doesn't mean it's easy," I said to Alisa today), and raising the boys and keeping my career in science alive at a level where I can make reasonably useful contributions in my field and pay the bills.  If you're a reader, you know that all this regularly gives us gray hairs.

But looking back on a year like the one we just had is certainly enough to make me glad that we're still going.  As routine as this sort of life as might have become for us, it still adds up to something very rewarding when we take a moment to think about it…

Happy 2014, from Galactic.

Escape

So our week-long stay in the Whangarei marina turned, by the immutable laws of boat time, into nine days. But on that ninth day my last pre-Christmas project (fixing leaky shower plumbing and replacing the bulkhead that had been soaking up water - for years, I think) was close enough to finished that we could leave. And, by the way, for this job Whangarei handily produced a no-nonsense plumbing supply shop and some good-natured chippies who could offered to knock up a new bulkhead by the next morning when they heard we were going out for Christmas, once again proving itself as that most valued place for people living on voyaging boats - somewhere where it's easy to get things done.

So we got down the long estuary that is curiously identified only as the "Whangarei Harbour" on the chart, back to the joyous existence of free agents with no fixed address, this time finding ourselves at the vaguely Middle-Earth Whangarei Heads. Here we had various adventures (a southwesterly blow; a seven-year-old with skin infection on the finger, spreading to the hand, and the implausibility of any sort of GP visit on the weekend before Christmas; parents playing stand-in GP with the ship's antibiotics; a long walk at the Heads the next day). And then we buggered off to Great Barrier Island (as named by James Cook) or Aotea (as named by someone long before).

Here the feared holiday crowds of Auckland yachts have failed to materialize. There are kaka flying through the forest and kereru displaying on the wing, and child-friendly tracks that lead conveniently to waterfalls. And, blessedly, there is no internet access at all. (Everyone is aware that Facebook is a fad, but I am prepared to stick my neck out and call the entire damn internet a fad, and one that we will all be embarrassed to remember.)

Here we have just finished another perfect Christmas, which is quite easy when you're one, prepared to be completely pagan about it; two, have little children to lend their enthusiasm to the holiday; and three, have a few shekels in hand to throw away on their presents. Santa left a bunch of Playmobiles (murderous toy knights) set up on the saloon table and that set the day off with 0600 squeals of boyish delight. Alisa recreated my grandmother's Christmas stollen ("how can you look so Lebanese and bake so German? I asked) and produced four varieties of Christmas cookies; it rained enough through the day to give us the perfect atmosphere for playing with toys and reading and napping, but not enough to keep us from a walk to the waterfall; and we have been discovering the pleasures of Marlborough Sounds pinot noir.

I find that I am falling for life in the Southern Hemisphere, and it may largely because of how much I find Christmas agrees with me as a summer holiday.

Closing the Circles

Most sailors in the South Pacific would rather not spend the cyclone season in the tropics, growing mold on their boats.  Many would rather not put themselves in contact with Australian officialdom.  So that turns New Zealand into a great crossroads for traveling boats.  Many adventures stop or start here.

As a result, one highlight of this season has been catching up with some faces from the past.

There was Pacific Bliss, of course - that's them on board Galactic, above, in the ill-fated marina that we shared with them in Auckland for four days.  It was remarkable really that Colin managed to find us dock space in downtown Auckland in December, and even more remarkable was the price that he organized for us to pay for our stay - one carton of beer.  Colin has the touch, I suppose.

And Colin and Liz, and by extension, their kids, are some of the most remarkable travelers we've met.  They're storytellers, not writers, but check out this tidbit from their stay in northern Vanuatu last season.

In Opua we also caught up with Michelle and Richard on Thélème.  We don't know these folks as well as the Bliss, having met them only briefly in Tahiti five years ago.  But they're the kind of people who you remember - super-adventurous sailors who have been to any number of places (Tahanea for six months at a time! Kodiak!  South Georgia! Five years in Patagonia!) and are super-relaxed about it all.  For a year or two after we first met them, we kept running into other boats who knew Thélème - all that sailing puts them in the way of a lot of other adventurous sailors, and I get the idea they've become well-known to a small cognoscenti.  They were very positive about our plans for Patagonia, and gave us some useful advice.

And, there's one other circle that we've closed here.  The dock that we've been tied to for the last week, in the Town Basin marina in Whangarei, looks back on a dock that I've been to before.  Three years ago, I came here to check out a boat we might buy.  That one turned out not to be "the one", of course, and it's a pleasure to be looking at that spot from the decks of the boat we eventually found, after our year of looking, and to be very happy with what we ended up with...