Tuesday, 26 July.  We made it!  After motoring all night, we had a great day's sailing, starting with the Genoa poled out and one reef in the main and ending up with with nothing more than 25 knots from just forward of the beam and a couple of flashes of 13+ knots on the GPS log.  The God of small yachts was clearly looking after us and we arrived in the Bay of Islands early afternoon, having decided to stop here in the daylight rather than go on slowly overnight to Whangarei.  

Word of warning to any foreign yacht coming to New Zealand, not only did we have to surrender the few (New Zealand) apples that we had left in the fridge, as well as all the other things we knew about like honey, eggs, Biosecurity also confiscated the entire contents of the deep freeze.  They allow meat products from only two other countries in the world into New Zealand, not including Fiji, Tonga, Argentina or anywhere else we had bought meat from, they do not allow hard boiled eggs in and they are completely averse to any sort of "green" product, including baskets, hats etc that could harbour any insect life.  All we had left for supper was some New Zealand cheese and yoghurt!  Luckily the local store was still open, so we bought some steak to go with the cooked vegetables that we were allowed to keep, which with a strong "anchor nip" helped restore our delight at arrival which had been sorely dented by seeing some lovely cuts of meat disappear into a black bin bag.

Yesterday was a lovely sunny day, spent catching up with a massive amount of washing that needed doing, finding out if we can leave the boat here, hiring a car, walking in the Opua forest and recharging our batteries.

Today we must sort out whether we are going to leave the boat here or whether we have to go on to Whangarei, as the weather is very unpromising for the next few days and we cannot really start putting the boat to bed until we arrive at our final destination.

Alcedo