Sitting aground

Salsa af Stavsnas
Ellinor Ristoff Staffan Ehde
Sun 2 Mar 2014 02:31
It is Sunday afternoon, 3pm. We are waiting for the tide to return.
We are sitting just outside the marina in Whitianga waiting for the tide to rise. We are stuck.
We came in at low tide and I thought we would be fine, but obviously there was not enough water under the hull.
No big deal. We just wait an hour or so.
This weekend we have been out with Ian and Jan, we took off Friday afternoon just after the kids finished school.
The wind was quite hard but the forecast said it was going to ease during friday night.
We went to Opitu bay and stayed overnight. A nice evening.
Next day we went further north in the bay and thanks to Craig and Verena (our neighbors in the marina) I could use their dive gear and go down to 15 meter and pick scallops. Came up freezing but with about 40 scallops in the right size.
We headed to Mercury island while everybody on board but me worked on getting the scallops open.
The wind continued to be hard, around 20 knots and SSW. This meant that when we came to the southern shores och Mercury we found no shelter. The wind was predicted to move westward so we sailed back to Opitu beach and anchored. There we had Scallops as entrée and sushi as the main course.
Sushi was made on board with japanese rice etc.
It was really good.
This morning we sailed off towards Whitianga and had a great wind on the nose.
But as we entered the channel and underway into the marina we got stuck.
Ellinor took Ian and Jan in the dinghy ashore and now we are just waiting for tide to go up...