New Zealand - Tauranga

8 January 2005

Our first stop in the Tauranga area was at Mount Maunganui and we anchored in the shallows of Pilot Bay.  We stayed a couple of days, but our anchor dragged and with bad weather threatening we moved round to The Bridge Marina for a couple of nights – and stayed for four months.

Mount Maunganui

I have neglected to mention that whilst in Panama we had received the annual notification to renew from our insurers. Our first year in the Med, insurance was 1% of the yacht’s value; in year two across the Atlantic it doubled to 2%, and now for year three it doubled again to 4%. Well, we just couldn’t afford that so we declined insurance, along with most of the boats that crossed the Pacific. Of course, it is illegal to enter a marina without insurance so we simply lied and quoted our old policy number. We didn’t buy insurance again until we got back to the Med.

Mike found work quite quickly working in the marina boat yard. The labour was hard and the pay wasn’t good (by our standards) but he was grateful to get work. Mostly, he was sanding anti-foul paint off hulls and would come home exhausted every evening, a different coloured poison engrained into every pore. Fortunately the job only lasted 3 months, as prolonged exposure to that dust can cause serious health problems, particularly as Mike refused to wear mask or eye shield.

Mike and Ellie scraping Forever's bottom

It took me longer, but through friends of our friend Ellie, who ran the marina coffee shop, Kikka (from Maistracc) and I found work pruning vines in a kiwi fruit orchard at Te Puke, about 25 miles away.  The vines had been left too long and were very thick and strong; pruning with our necks craned backwards and arms stretched upwards all day was agonising and physically this job qualifies as my worst ever. However, having Kikka to work with every day was fun and made it bearable.  She is Italian and speaks good English and French, so each day we would chat for some hours in French to help me improve in that language.

Kikka and I in the orchard

The area around Tauranga is beautiful with stunning beaches. Ellie had an apartment near a particularly good beach and took us surfing (she and Mike) and bodyboarding (me). The summer, when it finally came, was gorgeous. We had our bikes so were pretty mobile. There were some good cruisers in the marina and we frequently attended the communal bbq on Friday and Saturday nights. But New Zealanders like to eat early and our best cruising friends tended to be the continentals – Italian Kikka and Andrea, Spanish Lois and Marissa, French Jean Pierre – who prefer to eat late so we often found ourselves partying from 5.30 till midnight. No problem. Old Pacific friends Nicole and Pieter from Petima had hired a car and came to visit us during their tour. I learned to make sake (rice wine) and Jean Pierre taught me to make fresh mayonnaise. We also bought a beer kit and made our own lager.

I took my frozen video camera into a shop to be repaired but was advised that it needed a new ‘motherboard’ which would be unwarrantedly expensive. It might be cheaper in England, he said. So that was that. Very sad.

Eventually, we lifted Forever out of the water and Mike scraped the hull and anit-fouled. He had various other jobs to do including replacing some of the rigging, and we had the ship’s compass and battery charger repaired. My work in the factory had come to an end and Mike also stopped work to get on with our boat. We had been in New Zealand for six months. Our combined earnings had paid for the marina, our living expenses, all work to the boat, and there was a little left to carry on sailing with. A couple of months later I even received a refund cheque of over $100 from the tax man. Nice.

We started to make plans to leave, still very much in a quandary about what to do with ourselves. There was some talk for a while of Mike continuing to sail the boat with a friend whilst I flew back to the UK and looked for decent work and/or hunted around for a business to buy, but it wasn’t a workable plan. We talked about going to Australia (with a view to investigating the settlement issue once again) then to Bali, across the Indian Ocean to the Cocos Islands, the Seychelles and then up the Red Sea, through Suez Canal and back into the Med by December that year. Then Mike said he thought we should take another year and go to Thailand. Well, I was MAD to go to Thailand, but crumbs, where was the money going to come from? We talked and discussed and argued, but made no definite decisions. We both were hoping that we would arrive somewhere, just love it and stay. But so far, that hadn’t happened.

When Jean-Pierre, who lived in New Caledonia but had come to Tauranga specifically to get some major works done on his yacht Melancolie, left in late April he suggested we visit New Caledonia before going on to Australia and so we decided that’s what we’d do. On the 1st of May 2005 we checked out, stocked up with food (knowing New Cal would be expensive in that area but NOT knowing they had strict quarantine) and set off northwards. At 3 am the following morning we had a disaster with our in-mast roller furling system – and we’d been congratulating ourselves only recently on that fact that we’d never had a problem with it. Ha ha. The details would only bore, but it was a nightmare for us and we had to motor into the nearest harbour, which happened to be Whangerai again.

As we’d already formally checked out, we had to radio the Customs and Immigration authorities who gave permission to make an emergency landfall. We remained in Whangerai for 6 days and made contact with various old friends.  A lot of the cruisers we knew had tried to settle in New Zealand, and quite a few were briefly successful; with good qualifications they managed to find work and had a go at settling.  However, only one couple are still there today and another couple who settled in Australia.  For the rest of us, the cruising route had become much more dispersed, and we saw only a few of the Pacific crowd again. 

Having repaired the furling system ourselves (an extremely complicated and difficult job), and had the torn mainsail re-stitched, we snuck out of NZ again on the 7th May, two days after our visas had expired.