Whangarei 11 January 2013

The EJ's Voyage
Mike Everton-Jones
Thu 10 Jan 2013 23:29
We are back on board. The boat is still on the hard at Norsand Boatyard in Whangarei. We had a bit of a shock to discover that during our absence they had painted the hull in a red colour antifoul! Luckily, our instructions to paint it in black were very clear and in writing so the yard foreman had to accept his error and subsequently resprayed the hull in black. Falbala now looks very smart indeed with her polished hull, new dark blue bootleg stripe and her black bottom...
They will launch us back in the water on Monday morning. It will take a few days to put back on board what we did store in the locker room last year, like all the sails. Then we will be ready to go cruising again. Our first destination will probably be the Bay of Islands. The weather is very hot and sunny at the moment.
 
We enjoyed the South Island despite the mixed weather. Some nights were so cold that we went to bed in our van fully clothed! It was very wet and miserable for about 3 days over New Year but otherwise it was fine, nice and sunny.
 
We drove from North to South and East to West, a lot of mileage but we have now a pretty good picture of the South Island landscape. Some mesmerising sceneries in the mountain area with huge lakes where the colour of the water is bright turquoise. As far as the towns are concerned, we enjoyed Christchuch despite the desolation caused by the earthquakes damages but there is still a good feel about it; Queenstown, not so much for the town but because it is in a beautiful setting at the border of a lake surrounded by high peaks; Arrowtown because it was very quaint, Dunedin because it is has a strong Scottish history and therefore has a European feel with some beautiful buildings like the fire station and the railway station; Nelson but we would have liked to spend more time there. Some other places have a very "back in time" atmosphere and feel very strange like Westport and Greymouth.
 
We spent the last weekend on our friends Phil and Helen boat in the Marlborough Sounds. Magnificent cruising area with lots of deserted anchorages. We dragged a net to catch scallops and caught 56 of them. Helen cooked them beautifully that night in 4 different ways. Delicious! However, as we discovered, the weather can be very unpredictable. We had a beautiful calm sunny day on Saturday and it was the same on Sunday morning. Then early afternoon the clouds came and the wind picked up in no time at all. We went from 10 to 32 knots in minutes. It blew all night and the calm returned the next morning.
 
Then it was time to catch our ferry back to Wellington where Trevor and Jo, the sailing friends we met in Panama were waiting for us. Their boat is in Australia and they are touring NZ in a caravan. They were due to take to ferry to the South Island the day we returned to Wellington but delayed their departure for 1 day so we could catch up. We had a fun evening in a beautiful campsite in the middle of nowhere. So good to see them again. The perfect ending to our 3 week adventure.
 
Some photos attached. Unfortunately you will have noticed by now that unfortunately the program doesn't allow me to write a legend underneath each of them.
 
Hope you are all well and had a good start to the New Year!
 
 
 

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