Tauranga to Hauraki Gulf

Our unforeseen stop in Tauranga set us back a bit on our schedule to get to Auckland. We had planned to take a little bit of time sailing up the east coast of the Coromandel Peninsula and across Mercury Bay. However, we left Tauranga on the Tuesday morning and needed to be in Auckland by the following Saturday, which meant that we ended up skimming over this section of coastline. We spent a night at Mayor Island again, and one night at Slipper Island. However both anchorages were a bit bouncy in the southeast swell coming across the Bay of Plenty. We left the anchorage at Slipper Island on the Thursday morning and spent around 6-7 hours doing a slow sail up the 30 miles of coastline to Great Mercury Island.

Mercury Bay was particularly beautiful, and the anchorage at Great Mercury Island was well sheltered with a nice beach and anchoring in 4 metres of crystal clear water. We had planned to stay overnight at Great Mercury Island on the Thursday and Friday nights and do the last leg around to Auckland on Saturday, however MetService issued a wind warning for the Hauraki Gulf over the weekend. Reluctantly, given the beautiful anchorage, we decided it would be sensible for us to sail to Gulf Harbour marina ahead of the nasty weather, which was forecast to be building to 25kts gusting 35kts from Friday morning onwards. In the end we arrived at Great Mercury Island around 4pm, stopped off for a few hours for a nap and some dinner and departed again at 9pm ready to do the 55 mile, 12 hour overnight sail to Gulf Harbour marina.

Sailing into Mercury Bay

Leaving the anchorage in the dark was interesting as there was still quite a lot of boat traffic, mainly fishing vessels, to contend with. We were also a little nervous about sailing across the Hauraki Gulf at night because of busy shipping route into Auckland Harbour. We have an AIS receiver on board, which receives signals from other boats that have an AIS transponder. The AIS gives us information about other boats’ position, speed and heading, and calculates our potential proximity based on our own speed and heading and theirs. We found this really useful for navigation at night, as it’s sometimes difficult to work out how close you are going to pass to large tankers.

We rounded Cape Colville at the top of the Coromandel Peninsula around 2am and started to head across the gulf. As forecast, the wind started to build in the early hours of the morning, just after my 3am watch started, and we made quick progress sailing at 6-7kts with the wind on our beam. Once the wind really started to pick up, around 6am, I woke Dave up to help reef the sails as we started to head up into 25kts of wind. Thankfully we made it into the marina around 9am Friday morning, before the forecast 35kts kicked in. We were both pretty tired after only getting in one 3-hour sleep each overnight so we put our heads down for a nap as soon as we were safely tied to the dock.

It was nice to have a couple of days in the marina to tidy up the boat and re-stock the fridge before my mum joined us. She flew in from the UK late on the Saturday evening and we planned for her to catch the ferry from Auckland on Sunday out to Gulf Harbour. Unfortunately I hadn’t looked closely at the ferry timetable and only realised the day before that the ferry operates a limited weekend schedule with only a 9am departure from Auckland on a Sunday morning. I felt really guilty when I left a message at her hotel about the ferry times, and instructions to catch the 7am airport bus to get her to the ferry check-in at 8:30am, after stepping off a 24hr flight and only arriving at her hotel at 1am that morning! To her credit, she bounced off the ferry at 9:30am looking very bright eyed and excited to have arrived. Now we’re looking forward to unpacking the kayak and getting back into holiday mode as we cruise around the islands in the Hauraki Gulf.