The Barrier

We’ve spent the last 12 days enjoying Great Barrier Island. Since the clocks changed at Easter the days are noticeably shorter, with sunset just after 6pm and the weather has also gotten noticeably cooler. We’ve been putting our jeans, jumpers and socks on in the evenings for the first time in a few months. Although the weather has been very showery over the last week, we’ve had enough dry spells to get out and explore the island.

Port Fitzroy harbour, Great Barrier

We spent the first few nights anchored in Smokehouse Bay, which is a very popular anchorage with boaties.  As the name suggests, there is a smokehouse on shore to smoke fish, a bathhouse with water heated from a wood burner, and sinks with old-fashioned laundry presses. The facilities were pretty rustic but it was a treat to have a hot bath. They were kindly donated by the Webster Family for visiting boaties and they rely on donations to assist with their upkeep.

The Bathhouse, with woodburner at Smokehouse Bay

Doing the washing old school

We spent several nights at Smokehouse Bay sheltering from the southwesterly gales that blew through on our first few nights at Great Barrier. The anchoring in Smokehouse is in deep water and it was the first time our anchoring skills were really put to the test. We’ve got an oversized Rocna anchor, which is reputedly very good, with 60 metres of new chain and another 60 metres of nylon rope spliced to the end of the chain. We also installed a new anchor winch (windlass) just before we left Wellington. For the first time on this trip we have frequently been letting out all 60 metres of chain and getting into the rope section having anchored in 10+ metres of water and having 30 knots of wind blow through the anchorage. We were very glad for the electric windlass as pulling up 60 metres of chain without it would have been a mission!

A large part of the island is owned and managed by the Department of Conservation, and there is an extensive network of walking tracks to explore. Unfortunately a few of these are still closed after storms in June 2014, the effects of which can still clearly be seen with the amount of forest debris strewn all over. 

Storm debris still evident along the tracks

More storm debris

We managed to do quite a few walks from anchorages in Port Fitzroy harbour, the best of which was a 3 hour return from Kiwiriki Bay up to the Maungapiko lookout which had spectacular views over Mt Hobson and the east coast of the island. We also rented a “dent” for the day courtesy of North Barrier car rentals to allow us to explore more of the island.

View from the Maungapiko lookout

Our rent a "dent" for the day

The east coast has beautiful sandy beaches but is very open to the elements and so best not explored by sailboat except in the calmest conditions. It was great to have the car for the day and access some of the walking tracks that are not along the coast. We walked up to the viewpoint in Windy Canyon, which was quite dramatic and true to it’s name, very windy.

Viewpoint at Windy Canyon

View of coast from Windy Canyon

We also walked to the natural hot springs that were very stinky and sulphurous, but pretty novel, as we have only been to commercial hot springs in New Zealand before. We’ve also noticed a lot more birdlife on the island than on the mainland including seeing plenty of Kakas (native woodland parrots) and a Morepork (Ruru – native owl) on our ramblings.

Bradshaw Cove, Kaikoura Island, our anchorage for our last night at Great Barrier

Later in the week, we went back to Kiwiriki Bay, as it was such a picturesque anchorage, surrounded by cliffs and forest, plus our guidebook claims that “the kelp beds on the coastline here can produce Snapper up to 6kg, which can be a fisher’s lifesaver in bad weather.”  We’ve not had the best fishing track record on the trip so far, but the description in the guidebook sounded promising so we decided to give it a go. We must have spent a good hour, if not two, dinghy-ing around the bay trying to identify where these legendary kelp beds and giant Snapper were, without success. Eventually we gave up, went back to the boat and lazily chucked a line off the back “just in case”. It was a nice evening so we cracked open a nice bottle of red and some cheese we had been saving for a treat, and boom, fish on the line. We reeled it in to find a nice sized Snapper on the end and Dave cooked it up in a delicious curry for dinner. This just confirms my suspicions that there is no skill involved in fishing, only luck, well at least for us anyway!

Playing on the swing at Bradshaw Cove

On one of our last nights at Great Barrier we were joined in Port Fitzroy harbour by a tall ship (Spirit of New Zealand) and a New Zealand naval warship. They both made for quite a spectacular sight! We’ve since left Great Barrier and are now tucked up at Whangarei Heads waiting for some northeasterly gales to blow through. The weather at this time of year is definitely a lot less settled than it has been in the past couple of months. Winter is coming.

Spirit of New Zealand in Port Fitzroy, near Smokehouse Bay

Naval Ship, in Port Fitzroy near Smokehouse Bay

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