Easter at Kawau Island

After our week in the Coromandel and my mum’s departure, we packed up the boat again and set sail for Kawau Island. Unfortunately we were on a timeframe and there wasn’t much wind so we motored most of the way there. We had previously visited Kawau Island, and having met the owners of the boating club there, agreed to return for Easter weekend to help out. The boating club was in disrepair but had been taken over six month’s previously by David and Robyn who have turned the place around. 

Our first shift was for the Thursday curry night, which is very popular with the locals, and rightly so having tasted Derek the chef’s amazing red beef curry and lamb shank curry. We did five days work over the Easter weekend, serving drinks at the bar, waitressing and helping out in the kitchen. 

Dave, David, Robyn and me outside the boat club

Bon Accord harbour was packed with boats over the long weekend, and we were blessed with gorgeous sunny weather, which no doubt accounted for the 400 or so boats anchored there.  We were glad that we were able to use a mooring in Smelting House Bay as we were tucked well into the bay away from the worst of the crowds and we didn’t have to worry about other boats anchoring too close to us while we were working. We did hear about some other boats getting their anchor chains tangled due to the number of boats packed into the harbour.

View from our mooring in Smelting House Bay after the Easter crowds had gone.

At the end of the Easter weekend we had some friends from the UK, Anna and Brad, who are currently working in Auckland, visit us for a night. We had a good couple of days together, circumnavigating Kawau Island and doing some of the local walks. Neither of them had done much sailing before but I think they enjoyed learning the ropes while they were with us.

Anna and Brad getting to grips with sailing Desolina

We found some dinosaurs on our walk...

But they were only little

After Anna and Brad left we started to plan our crossing to Great Barrier Island. We wanted to stock up the boat on food, water and fuel as it had been a week since we left the marina. We were able to put in an order through the boating club to have some fresh fruit and vegetables delivered to the island and the club itself sells a few key essentials like milk. They also have fuel and water at the dock outside the boating club so we thought we were sorted. Unfortunately, the day before we planned to leave the boating club realised that they were virtually out of water after the high demands put on their well during the Easter weekend. They were forced to ration water to the bare minimum so were no longer able to fill our tanks there. Fortunately after asking around and checking our guidebook we found there were a couple of places we could get water on Great Barrier Island.

After the calm sunny weather over Easter we also had a few days of strong winds and rain showers so we were watching the weather quite closely for a good opportunity to make the crossing. We departed Kawau on the Saturday morning and had a very fast sail across to Great Barrier with 20-25kts of southwest winds behind us. We thought the crossing would take us around 6 hours but we ended up doing it in 4.5 hours instead with reefs in both the mainsail and headsail. We arrived at Great Barrier with only a few litres of water left in our tanks. We pumped out the remaining fresh drinking water from our main tanks into small jerry cans and filled our tanks with stream water that was available from the wharf in Port Fitzroy. Unfortunately it’s probably not safe for drinking without boiling, so we’re glad to have a separate safe supply of drinking water to save on the gas. We’re now hunkered down in Smokehouse Bay for a few days waiting out the worst of the southwest gales and thundery showers that have been coming through.

Approaching Great Barrier Island after a fast crossing