North Bound

When you start drinking Cup O’ Soup instead of sun downers you know it is time to leave! As the weather and the water, cooled we departed South Island on Monday 11^th and headed out through the Tory Channel, leaving Queen Charlotte Sound behind us. Dodging ferries and other traffic we headed out to the mouth of the channel, timing our passage to take advantage of the 6 knots of tide. If that had been against us we would have been going backwards!

Farewell South Island

Harvest time on the Tory Channel

Once through the choppy channel entrance we were greeted by an almost completely still Cook Strait. You can tell it’s still when the albatross are all sitting on the water. They rely on the wind to glide effortlessly across the water and when there isn’t any they just sit there and save energy. We were quite nervous about crossing this notorious stretch of water and so we weren’t too disappointed by the lack of wind and it meant we had great views of the pod of seven dusky dolphins that came to see us off.

Exiting the Tory Channel into the Cook Strait

This Albatross wasn't enjoying the still conditions

One of seven Dusky dolphins which came to say goodbye

The Cook Strait and the east coast of North island in general, is quite busy with commercial shipping carrying goods up and down the coast, as well as cruise ships and fishing boats. The ships all carry AIS and so are easy to spot on our chart plotter but the fishing boats often turn it off and so it’s important to keep a good watch. We had a few confusing close encounters with fishing boats along the way as it is always difficult to judge how far things are away in the dark.

The Cook Strait is a busy place!

Fishing boat at Dusk

One of many container ships heading down the coast

As we rounded Cape Palliser we settled into our watch system for the next four days.  This consists of us taking turns for 3 hours each at night and 5 hours each during the day.  Pat also does an early evening 4 hour watch while Debi does hers in the morning.  When not on watch, we sleep, or try to.  It’s not always easy when the boat is pitching and the noise that Bob, our auto-helm, makes, is almost, but not quite, enough to make us take the helm ourselves.

The trip was uneventful with very light winds so we had a combination of sailing and motor sailing. We had the engine on for about 60% of the trip which was a  little more than we would have liked, but we covered the 555nm miles in a little over 4 days which was pretty much as planned. We arrived into Tryphena harbour on Great Barrier Island on Friday afternoon and after four dry days the bottle of bubbly came out, followed by a pretty solid sleep.

Feeling in need of some exercise after the long passage, we hauled out our inflatable kayak and headed off to explore on land.  It is a lot easier to carry than the dinghy and, as the tide goes in and out a very long way here, we contemplated using it as our means of transport while we are here.  However, on our way back to the boat the kayak insisted on going to port (left).  Eventually we got around the problem by Debi paddling on the left side only and we managed to wobble our way back to the boat.  The problem turned out to be a missing front tracking fin.  We went back in the dinghy later to look for it but to no avail so that has put paid to any further kayak trips until a replacement can be found.

Kayak madness

Our arrival in Tryphena was carefully timed to coincide with the St. Patrick’s day celidh at the Currach Irish pub in Tryphena. We were frequent patrons of this fine establishment last year and were very pleased to return. We had a nice meal and some chaotic dancing, and just a few glasses of Guinness. So we have now added a fourth “D” to the dangerous three “D’s” known to cruisers, Drink, Darkness, Dinghy and Dancing! A very dangerous combination, but we managed to get safely back to X-Pat despite them all.

Enough said!

The not very Irish, Irish band

On Monday (18^th), despite feeling a bit jaded, we decided to head around to the east coast of the island, something we didn’t manage to do on our last visit. We knew there was a light easterly forecast and thought we would be fine. However, as we got around to the east side we were met with a 2-3m swell, which wasn’t at all comfortable.

We persevered, motor sailing along a very spectacular coastline and decided to explore what is possibly the only anchorage on the east coast which is sheltered in an east wind. This is a place called “The Cove” on the NW side of Rakitu (Arid) Island. This proved to be an absolutely lovely little anchorage through a fairly narrow entrance in between some spectacular rocks.  Pat managed to catch a snapper, which we had for supper and we settled down for a nice evening in the cove.

At anchor in The Cove

Rakitu Island

Time for some exercise

This morning we took the dinghy ashore and explored the island. Like many islands here, this one is now administered by the Department of Conservation. There were a number of buildings on the shore but none looked particularly inhabited. We did a short walk up the valley to the east side of the island, with views back down the coast of Great Barrier Island where we had sailed yesterday.

Back on board X-Pat we departed the Cove and headed around the Northern tip of Great Barrier Island and we are now anchored in Nimaru Bay on the west side of the island again. The weather is a bit grey but the water temperature is 20 degree C, which is a lot better than the 13 degrees that we left behind in Queen Charlotte Sound!

Tomorrow we plan to head around to Port Fitzroy.