New Zealand - Whangerai & Auckland

Whangerai and Auckland

5 November 2004

There was a lot of hype amongst cruisers about this last stretch as it had produced some nasty and deadly storms in the past, but the gods were with us and we had a pleasant and uneventful eleven day sail. We crossed the real Date Line on this trip, although we had already put our clocks forward in Tonga. I was keen to stop (all breaks were always welcome to me) at Minerva Reef, an exciting spot where one can anchor in what appears to be the middle of the ocean. However, my ‘ancient mariner’, good old Cap’n Pugwash, liked the long hauls and so we just kept on going. Other yachts we knew had a bad time there, so on reflection I was glad we didn’t stop. There were advance forms we’d all had to fill out and post from Tonga, giving details of ourselves and our boat as well as our estimated date or arrival, and amazingly we arrived precisely on the date we’d predicted, the 5th of November, at the anchorage in Whangerai, at the upper end of the North Island.

Above is a stylised map of the Pacific showing the path of our trip. I refuse to count the French Polynesian island groups as one country and so, counting them separately, we can add another 5 countries (Marquesas, Tuomotus, Societies, Cooks and Tonga) making the total now 25 countries. The trip from Marquesas to New Zealand was a further 3877 miles bringing our grand total to 18930 nautical miles.
I calculated that we had motored 14% of our Pacific crossing time. We knew a boat who said they had motored 50% of the time which we thought was very high, but their boat was bigger than Forever and needed more wind to get going. A lot of boats did motor often, to keep their batteries charged, or just to keep moving when the wind was light, but we liked to motor only when we absolutely had to. We always felt so proud (inordinately so, I am sure) whenever we laid or weighed anchor without the motor. I felt like a proper sailor at that point, no longer an amateur. We had both learned a lot in the past three years, and there was not much that Mike couldn’t fix on his own.

We’d been lucky and not hit any really bad weather nor had we had any major problems with our boat. Not everyone was so lucky. A Japanese boat was boarded by pirates off Ecuador, the man and his wife were tied up and everything valuable taken. They were not injured, fortunately; they sailed back to Panama, restocked and courageously sailed again for the Marquesas. Another boat suffered a series of mishaps starting with needing some medication, a container ship answered the distress call and came alongside, but bumped the yacht in the heavy seas and broke the spreaders, which caused the mast to break and fall away with all sails and rigging into the sea. The collision also injured the wife’s hip, so another distress signal was sent out and the French navy finally rescued them, but they lost their (uninsured) boat. We all felt very sad for them. Two other boats suffered dismasting in the Tuomotus, and had to limp the rest of the way with a jury rig, including our friends on Taraipo. Many boats suffered bad damage in the gale at Tahiti and again in a gale near Nuie (which we just missed) and I’m sure there were many more scary stories to tell among the boats we didn’t know. However, no lives were lost to the best of my knowledge and we were all grateful for that.


There had also been a lot of chatter about quarantine and what was allowed into New Zealand and what was not. To be safe, we ran all our stocks of fresh food down to almost nothing, and were eating vegetable stew for the last two days! As it happened, they were more relaxed and reasonable that we had been led to believe, but our boat was almost empty. Just hours before making landfall, I peeled my last cloves of garlic, throwing the skins overboard, and put them into a small bottle with olive oil. The man asked when I’d done it and, feeling guilty, I confessed that I’d only just done it. He tsk tsked, but let me keep them. We’d scrubbed our boots to make sure there was no mud on them and all that sort of thing, but they didn’t ask or look.


Whangerai is the northernmost city in New Zealand and the regional capital of Northland Region and the town itself is found at the northern tip of a very large bay formed by the extremely indented coastline. We had to sail and motor up about 40 miles from the outside ocean before arriving at the Town Basin Marina where we tied up on a finger pontoon. Flowing through the town and into the bay is the river Hatea. The Town Basin was a pleasant marina and Whangerai itself was charming and well laid out.

We found ourselves generally impressed with everything in New Zealand, except the weather, which the locals thought was good! None of our sailing buddies were there, most of them having stopped at Opua in the Bay of Islands further north. However, we made contact with old New Zealand friends whom we originally met in Italy on the boat A Different Song, two years before. Now living on land and no longer together, we spent a very pleasant time in Kerikeri with each of them individually. Our friends on Solvesta, Moose and Tapasya, who had all bought cars and were all anchored over at Tutukaka, came to visit. Colin invited us to do a little touring round the island with him, but much as we would have loved to, money was too tight and we had to decline.

By the time we got to New Zealand, my beloved computer would no longer even boot up. With no anti-virus software, it had contracted a virus that had been slowly eating Windows.  So I took it in to a computer shop and left it with a nice young man, originally from Curacao who spent many hours, days actually, debugging it, reloading our precious electronic software and various other important programs. In the process we unfortunately lost all the photos that I had downloaded from the now defunct video camera as he was unable to reload them. The bill, when he presented it, was NZ$50! I’d been bracing myself and expected at least a couple of hundred dollars (which we could ill afford) but he refused to accept more because we were cruisers and he had plans to go cruising himself one day. I sincerely hope he eventually did go cruising and that he will meet people as nice as we did. The cruising network is a good one. That computer, bought in 2001, still works to this day and I keep it because it still has the electronic charts of the world on it.

On 18 November we moved to Kissing Point where we tied the boat between piles in a cheap non-liveaboard site and took the bus to Auckland to visit with Mike’s brother, Nick, his wife Dee and their three adult kids. They were extremely hospitable and had a good social crowd. We also caught up with a few old friends from Zimbabwe which was fun. After a weekend with them, we housesat for two weeks for American friends of theirs and thoroughly enjoyed all the space, garden, tv, internet connection, hot water, fridge, etc. etc. Oh, what bliss that was!

The main priority was to get work so on the advice of various friends we set off for Waiheke Island where we did manage to briefly get work, pruning vines. However, continuous rain - the worst winter for blah blah number of years - meant the work came to an early halt. We returned to Auckland and passed a pleasant and very wet (both alcoholic and rainy) Christmas and New Year with Nick and Dee. They kindly let us telephone Melanie and various other family members from their land line. Calls from mobiles were always far too expensive to contemplate.  It was here, on Boxing Day 2004, that we heard the awful news of the tsunami that was to devastate so much of South East Asia and take so many lives. 

During all this, we investigated the immigration issue which was difficult to say the least. But, in a nut shell, our advanced years, total lack of funds or useful qualifications rendered us highly undesirable applicants (as we’d already discovered in the United States) and we scored almost zero on their points system. There was only one possibility open to us, which was using the family connection. This required sponsorship from the New Zealand family member, meaning that Mike’s brother would have to agree to stand as guarantor for us for the first two years. He was not keen to do that, so that was the end of it. Mike was very disappointed but personally I wasn’t sorry as I felt New Zealand was just too far away – certainly from all my family and friends. So from then on we concentrated on getting temporary work just to keep going and to that end we visited the tax office and got ourselves tax numbers (the easiest thing in the world) and opened a bank account. Although we didn’t have work permits, a lot of employers were perfectly happy with these two things - wages could be paid direct and tax could be deducted.

Summer was (finally) marching along and we heard there was plenty of work in vineyards and orchards further south, so on the 8th of January 2005 we said goodbye to Nick and his family and set sail for the city of Nelson on the northern end of New Zealand’s South Island. However, we got as far as Tauranga, half way down the North Island, liked the area, found work there and just stayed for the next four months.