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Whangaroa Harbour – March 2020

New Zealand is about to go into full lockdown for at least 4 weeks. This means (amongst other things) that only essential services will be available and movement in and out of marinas will be restricted. It seems that most marinas are not letting boats in or out at all during lockdown. Luckily we are fairly well provisioned and Mari is in pretty good shape so we will just leave the marina and live on the hook.

We made a quick trip up to Paihia to collect the repaired wind generators that had kindly been picked up from the workshop by our friend Philip, just in the nick of time before official NZ lockdown. After spending the night just outside Russell, we made our way to Whangaroa Harbour where we planned to stay for at least a few days.

The fish we caught on the way in to Paihia.

Whangaroa harbour is spectacularly beautiful, with towering rocky outcrops, surrounding mountains and calm waters. There are numerous walking trails in the region and we are doing our best to explore the region without violating the rules of lockdown. So far we have done the Duke’s Nose track and the Wairakau Streams track which are very close to our anchorage in Rere bay.

Looking back at Mari from the track.
Misty mornings…

The last day of March we did a day trip up to Mangonui. There’s a very pretty township which we didn’t visit and a famous fish and chip shop which we also didn’t visit (a local paddling by on his kayak told us it was closed anyway). We caught another fish on the way back! We chose a different anchorage back in Whangaroa and were rewarded by a magnificent sunset.

Well, what do we do now?

The world has gone slightly mad! Coronavirus has caused so much mayhem that it’s hard to know what we should do. Do we dash home while we still can, leaving the jobs on the boat unfinished or stay here a bit longer, get to know New Zealand a bit better and live on our mobile socially isolated home?
We splashed the boat on Friday 20/3/20 and made our way up-river to the town basin marina to complete a few more jobs like fixing the broken wind speed thingy at the top of the mast. It’s so good to be back on the water! We will stay here for a few more days and then make our way north to Opua to collect our wind generators that have now been repaired. After that we shall see.

Our tender got her own special splashing

Back in NZ – March 2020

At last we are back in New Zealand and getting the boat ready for some cruising adventures locally before heading back to the NZ Bay of Islands for the start of the 2020 Pacific Circuit Rally.

The plan was to splash the boat this week but a nasty weather system is rearing its ugly head in the coming week so we took local advice and postponed splashing until next week.

So many jobs to do….but it’s not all bad living on the hard.

It’s not all bad living on the hard