Day 9 - Land Ahoy - 34 45.690S 174 24.977E

Aurora_b
Mike and Liz Downing
Mon 8 Nov 2010 02:25
Land! The hills around the Bay of Islands were spotted at 10.30 this morning. A lovely sight on a lovely day - sunny and crisp, but very little if any wind, so we've been motor sailing since 17.00 last night. The daily run was 132.6 miles and at 12.00 we had 27 miles to go. We've entered New Zealand's territorial waters and now have about 14 miles to go to the customs dock at Opua. So almost there, but not quite. Just had a great welcome form the locals - a pod of a dozen or more dolphins came to visit just after lunch and played around the boat for 20 minutes or so, taking it in turns to bow-ride in pairs. It's the first time we've seen them play like this since leaving European waters. Hope it's a sign of things to come - dolphins are marvelous to watch. We both went up to the bows to watch them, forgetting that our life tags (alarms that we have on our wrists) go off if we are that far forward, so it was back to the cockpit to cancel the man-overboard alarms.

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