21 April 2015 Paradise Bay, New Zealand
With a heavy heart, I put on my wetsuit & scuba tank and spent an hour scraping the hull. As well as scraping off the barnacles, I gave the hull a quick wipe down to get rid of most of the slime. I was very cold by the time that I got out of the water and it took a hot shower, a hot chocolate and an hour lying in the sun to get my core temperature up again.
In the afternoon, we went for a two hour walk on the island, which is lovely. We heard more bird song in this short walk than we’ve heard anywhere else in New Zealand and it’s a lovely island.
22 April 2015 Paradise Bay to Matauwhai Bay, New Zealand
It was a beautiful day, so we motored around to Matauwhai Bay, which is a secure anchorage, but visiting yachts have to anchor outside the large mooring field of about 100 local boats. The Russell Boat Club has a good dinghy dock, from where we walked ½ mile into the small town of Russell.
Russell has the distinction of being the first permanent European settlement and sea port in New Zealand. In the early 1800’s, it was one of the major whaling stations in the world and was a very rough place full of scoundrels, but now it’s a desirable district brimming with cafés, gift shops and B&Bs.
The Duke of Marlborough Hotel overlooks the bay and was the first officially licensed hotel in New Zealand, so it would have been churlish of us to not have a pint or two there. We had a fabulous boozy lunch and then retired back to the boat to sleep it off.
23 April 2015 Bay of Islands to Opua, New Zealand
Mid-morning, we motored further up the river to Opua Marina where we’d booked ourselves in for a week while we sort out Glenys’ tooth and get ready to leave New Zealand. Normally, we wouldn’t bother going into a marina, but there’s some bad weather coming in and the anchorage outside the marina is renowned for dragging, so I won’t be happy leaving the boat at anchor while we run around.
We spent the afternoon doing a few jobs running a few errands.
24 April 2015 Opua, New Zealand
We bummed a lift into Pahia to see a dentist, who took some x-rays of Glenys’ tooth. It looks like she has a small cavity at the bottom edge of her crown, so the dentist sent some notes and the x-rays off to the dentist in Whangarei. Unfortunately, it’s Anzac Day on Monday, so this is a long Bank Holiday week end and the dentist in Whangarei isn’t in his surgery until Tuesday 28th - this means that we’ve lost three days. Glenys made a tentative appointment to see the dentist on Thursday 30th.
We’ve now got no chance of leaving New Zealand until the 1st May, and that’s assuming that the dentist can sort out Glenys’ tooth in one session. There seems to be a reasonable weather window on the 29th, but I think that we’ll miss that and the next one won’t be for another week. We spent the rest of the day feeling depressed and pottering about.
25 April 2015 Opua, New Zealand
Glenys woke up with a bee in her bonnet about making a new bimini. Together with the various side flaps that attach, the bimini is our major protection against the sun & rain when we’re at sea. It’s been slowly falling apart for the past year and we’re worried that it might rip in the next bad weather that we have, which would make us miserable.
At 3 metres by 2.5 metres, the bimini is a large piece of material, so we ended up laying it out in the car park which is the largest flat surface we could find. It was a right mess, with lots of patches, so it was difficult to see the original shape. We unpicked some of the pieces and made a template of one corner assuming that the whole thing is symmetrical.
By the end of the afternoon, Glenys was busy sewing zips in place which hold the bimini in place on the 1” tube frame. Like the dinghy cover this is a three-dimensional object, with curves everywhere so I suspect that this job could turn into another epic…
26 April 2015 Opua, New Zealand
While Glenys worked on the bimini, I removed the main hose for the aft toilet. The toilet has been “chuckling” at us for the past couple of months – we pump it out, and then a minute later, we get odious air bubbles coming up from the bowl. I suspected that the 2 inch diameter pipe has become furred up with deposits, which is causing back pressure.
As always on a boat, it wasn’t easy. The pipe goes from the toilet through a bulkhead then loops through the engine room, up into the cockpit locker where it does a 180 degree turn back into the engine compartment and then down to the sea cock. It only took an hour to get it out; fifteen minutes of beating with a mallet to break up the furring; and then two hours to get the damn thing back in place.
During my struggles, I helped Glenys with the bimini. We had a couple of attempts to fit it, but our initial templates were either wrong or the frame is asymmetrical. Either way, she had to unpick most of her work and we’re now doing one corner at a time and having to repeatedly unpick and re-sew – it’s turned into a mission.
Paul and Monique from “Full Circle” have been collecting supplies for Vanuatu. Today they had a visit from a midwife from Keri Keri who dropped off a car load of things. We agreed to take some clothes, ropes and bedding to add to our collection.
In the evening, we went out to the Cruising Club for their excellent Sunday roast.
27 April 2015 Opua, New Zealand
It was absolutely horrible weather – a front came over during the night giving 3- 40 knot winds and driving rain. It was also a Bank holiday (Anzac Day) and everywhere was shut, so I lurked around in the morning messing about on my laptop. Meanwhile Glenys dragged out the new stuff for Vanuatu and sorted it all out, then painted a courtesy flag for Vanuatu.
In afternoon, the weather broke and we managed to do some work on the bimini, which is turning into an epic. Again all we have to do is move the material by 10mm and everything else is thrown ot of position. We managed to get the zips in the correct place for the front of the binini, nbut the back is still not right.
28 April 2015 Opua, New Zealand
Glenys received the good news that the dentist in Whangarei can see her tomorrow, so she booked a hire car for the 29th and 30th. The weather forecast looks good to leave on the 1st or 2nd, so as long as the tooth is sorted out, we’re aiming to leave in a few days’ time …
I talked to the customs office and submitted and advanced notice to leave New Zealand - I had already called them two weeks ago and they’ve received our pepper spray canisters from the arms locker in the local police station. I also submitted a request to the Vanuatu Customs to get permission to clear in at Aneityum, which is not a formal clearance port. Phew! It’s not easy getting out of here.
Glenys has been in touch with Shannon on “Lil Explorers” who is already in Aneityum in Vanuatu. She tells us that there is a nurse (Roger) in the village who would really love a Nebuliser and some Salbutamol (which is a machine and the drug to help asthmatic people breathe easier). Roger has six asthmatic people on his island and the Vanuatu government has ignored his requests for a nebuliser.
Shannon tells us that a few months ago, Roger had to watch an 18 year old villager die in front of his eyes, because he didn’t have a nebuliser, so Glenys did some research and found a company in New Zealand that can ship us one by Thursday. They only cost £75, so it’s a crying shame that someone died through the lack of one. I contacted Doctor Whitton in Whangarei and he has arranged to meet us tomorrow and seems willing to write a prescription for the Salbutamol.
We got in touch with a guy called Harry Fox, who lives in Kawa Kawa with his Vanuatu wife, Benesta. They collect clothing and other supplies for the Vanuatu people, so we offered to take some things over for them. Harry turned up with a huge van with ten boxes of school books, two push chairs, pots and pans and even a rolled up mattress. We had to decline most of it and ended up with two big boxes of school books which we have to take to Benesta’s mother on Tomman Island and two sacks of cookware for Benesta’s daughter in Port Vila.
After Harry left, Paul and Monica from “Full Circle” came and asked if I could look at their laptop which wouldn’t work with an internet aerial and a GPS dongle. It was Windows 8, so it was a struggle but after two hours of messing about and downloading drivers, I managed to get them up and working.
With all this running around and visitors, we didn’t make much progress on the bimini during the day, so we were working until half past nine to get it ready for another fitting tomorrow. This is now on our critical path – if we don’t get it finished them we won’t be leaving.
29 April 2015 Opua, New Zealand
We picked up our hire car and shot off to Whangarei. Doctor Whitton was our first call, who was brilliant and gave us the prescription for 80 doses of Salbutamol. He also gave us a prescription for three inhalers and donated four “spacers”, which are tubes to help young or weak people to use an inhaler. If Roger had one of these spacers than it may have helped the young man who died.
We did some running around in Whangarei, to get various things. It’s amazing how well we know Whangarei and can quickly find almost anything - it’s a great little city.
Glenys’ appointment with the dentist went well. She had a small cavity at the edge of her crown where some cement was missing and the gap between the crown and the next tooth was too thin resulting in a food trap and causing some inflammation of her gum. The dentist sorted it all out and she should be okay now.
We managed to get back to the boat before dark and collapsed with a bottle of wine and a huge plate of Spaghetti Bolognese.
30 April 2015 Opua, New Zealand
The weather forecast still looks good for the next seven days and we’ve decided to leave on Saturday 2nd. We’ll probably be motoring for the first day, but then should pick up ENE winds, which will put us on a beam reach for three days. A low pressure trough is then forecast to pass over us, which might give us unpleasant, 25 knot winds and rain for a day or so, but nothing too bad (we hope).
We spent a couple of hours on the bimini and got the hardest part finished. We now have to put on the edging tape and some zips for some side flaps to keep rain out of the cockpit. I reckon we’ve got a couple of hours more work and it should be done, which will be a relief.
We zipped off in our hire car to do some provisioning. Our first stop was at a liquor store where we ordered some duty free booze to be delivered to the boat after we’ve cleared out – 8 bottles of rum, 20 litres of wine and 84 cans of beer. There are regulations restricting the amount of alcohol that we take out of the country (which is a strange concept) and we had to fill in a form which will have to be approved by customs before we can leave.
The regulations state that the amount of alcohol depends on the number of days that we’ll be at sea until the next port. For each crew member, we can take 3.3 litres of spirits per 10 days of voyage time; one 750ml bottle of wine per day and six 375ml cans of beer per day. We’re expecting our passage to take 8 days, so we larded it up a bit and gave them a projected voyage of 14 days – well, it might be slow going….
This 14 day passage allows us to take – 13.6 litres of spirits; 21 litres of wine and 168 cans of beer, so we should be well within their limits. Reading up on the regulations, it would appear that the regulations are all about “Alcohol and tobacco products intended for passenger and crew consumption en route”. Well, if I drank 330ml of spirits, a bottle of wine and six cans of beer each day, I’d be dead by the time we arrived in Vanuatu.
With the alcohol sorted out, we headed into Keri Keri, where we loaded two huge supermarket trolleys with food, then headed back to the boat, where Glenys spent a couple of hours stowing it all away, hindered by the large bags of supplies for Vanuatu that seem to be everywhere.
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