“After our diving adventure in the Cavallis, the following day we headed out to sea and cruised 40 or 50 miles south. With the wind non-existent, we substituted the motor and cruised along at about eight knots. Because the water was glassy smooth, we were able to spot schools of tuna nearby from the ruffled surface marking their passage. Rod trolled with his favorite lure but sadly failed to hook one. We had to go to the fish market in Auckland to have tuna steaks for dinner.
We anchored overnight back in Tutukaka Harbor and the next day motored another 40 miles or so to Kawau Island to spend the night. There is an old governor’s mansion on this island, but unfortunately, we arrived too late to take the tour. Instead, we went for an hour-long hike (in drizzling rain) from the mansion to an old coastal copper mine. On the way, we scared up three or four wallabies! Apparently then-Governor Grey in the 1800s imported a certain kind of wallaby from Australia to populate the grounds. This species of wallaby is now extinct in Australia but thriving on Kawau, so they are being exported back to Australia to try to reestablish the population. They look like tiny miniature kangaroos.
The next morning we sailed to Waiheke Island for a 2-day visit. Waiheke is a well-developed island not too far from Auckland. Some residents commute daily by ferry to work in Auckland. There are some twenty-plus wineries on the island and it has a pleasant vacation vibe. We dinghied ashore and climbed up a hill to the Te Whau Winery where we sampled their red wine. Because it was Good Friday, we could purchase wine by the glass but they weren’t allowed to sell it by the bottle. Mike and I then took off for what was intended to be a leisurely walk but which turned into a 2-1/2 hour partial circumnavigation of the island.
Easter weekend is different in New Zealand from what we’re used to in the U.S. It is apparently the second biggest holiday after Christmas, and a lot of businesses were closed from Friday through the following Monday. In addition, a large portion of restaurants and cafes were closed as well. The ones that remained open tacked an extra 20% on top of their usual prices for the privilege of eating there!
Sunday morning we sailed from Waiheke to Auckland, making sure we arrived in plenty of time to attend a Norah Jones concert that night. The winds were pleasantly moderate, so we enjoyed sailing the entire way. Every time Rod spotted another boat under sail headed in our same general direction he had a tendency to make a race out of it, unbeknownst to our competitors. We tacked back and forth the whole trip, which is not the norm for a cruising boat but was good practice for us newbies.
“We sailed north to the Bay of Islands as I reported in my last travelog post, ending the journey at the Cavalli Islands where a wreck called the Rainbow Warrior has been relocated to create a marine preserve. The Rainbow Warrior was a Greenpeace vessel sunk in the 1980s in Auckland Harbor by the French Secret Service! The bombs used to sink it were sneaked into New Zealand aboard yachts and submarines.
Anouk is a licensed PADI Dive Instructor, a real bonus for Mike and me. Although we both had learned to scuba dive in decades past – I in high school and Mike a few years after we met – the technology has changed so dramatically that we both needed to learn the skills again pretty much from scratch.
We have purchased all our necessary dive gear in the town of Kerikeri and are now fully outfitted with tanks, regulators, BCD vests, dive computers, wet suits, etc., ready to undertake our first big scuba adventure. Anouk gave us a refresher course in dive theory and took Mike and me individually on a training dive in clear calm water where we could sink down about ten feet below the surface to a sandy bottom. There we practiced techniques such as clearing our masks, losing and retrieving our masks, sharing air with our “buddy”, hand signals, and other crucial skills.
Having passed Anouk’s inspection, it was on to the Cavallis where we were fortunate to be able to anchor for the night. Usually the sea is rough and choppy in that area, making for an uncomfortable anchorage, but we lucked onto calm conditions. The water was so clear we could look down from the deck of the boat and see individual seashells on the bottom twenty-five feet below. The shipwreck lies at a depth of 20-25 meters, making our inaugural dive quite the exploit.
Anouk and I went first as a buddy pair, and Mike and Rod took their turn after she and I resurfaced. In the clear blue water, the wreck was brightly colored with the pinks, purples, greens, blues, oranges, and yellows of thousands of small reef fish and beds of anemones. We spotted a moray eel and a scorpion fish in addition to hundreds of more common varieties. Anouk scribbled a note to me underwater on her dive slate – “WOW!”. The dive was one of the highlights of our entire vacation and has really whet our appetite for diving in Tonga and Fiji where the water is warmer and the fish even more colorful.”
“The next day Anouk and I left the guys on the boat and took the ferry across the bay from Russell to the slightly larger town of Paihia, where we had a good time browsing through the shops. I came home with boating shorts, a sarong, and Maori pants, all of which are quite different from my usual wardrobe at home but are eminently suitable for the sailing lifestyle, especially when the weather is warmer in Fiji and Tonga this summer.
Saturday we sailed out of Russell and anchored off another idyllic island where we rather overdid the exercise routine. After lunch Mike and I went on an even more challenging up and down hike around the island. This track is touted as an archaeological tramp, featuring multiple remnants of early Maori habitation and fortifications. We passed close by a fishing camp that was established by Zane Grey. To me, he is known as a famous and prolific author of American western fiction, but in New Zealand he is celebrated as a famous fisherman from back in the 1920s.
Being suitably hot after the hike, a swim looked good so I donned mask, snorkel, and fins and swam from the boat to the beach and back, which probably came close to half a mile. Mike worried about me so he came to my rescue with the dinghy but was sent back passenger-less as I wanted to swim both ways. I seem to have a lot of built-in natural flotation and the swim fins make it easy.
This morning Anouk and I went for an early morning shortened version of yesterday’s hike, did some gym exercises at the top of a knoll, went back to the boat and swam boat-beach-boat again, and then decided it was a perfect day for scuba training – so out came the tanks and gear. Anouk gave me a good introductory briefing and then we dove down to the sandy bottom where she drilled me on several diving techniques that are important from a safety standpoing, and then we paddled around underwater for a bit.
Needless to say, that was a pretty vigorous morning. I have decided the very best feature of this boat is the hot freshwater shower on the stern swim step. As we board the boat after a swim or dive, we can immediately rinse the salt off with nice warm water and even shampoo our hair if so desired.
Tonight we are back in a big marina called Opua Marina. This is the departure and returns port for ocean-going yachts headed from New Zealand towards distant shores, returning again at the end of the cruising season. Raven will be stationed here again in late May, looking for a weather window to make the 1,000-mile passage to Tonga. In the meantime, we plan to rent a car tomorrow and travel to the slightly bigger again town of Kerikeri for some sightseeing and shopping. Hopefully, we’ll be able to purchase our own dive gear in town and stop borrowing Rod’s and Anouk’s stuff.”
“It took a few days to get our internet connection going. There always seems to be some catch every time we come into port and try to get online. However on this stopover we have a wifi connection being broadcast throughout the marina where Raven is presently berthed, enabling us to sit in the cockpit and surf the web with ease. Very nice for a change!
After we dropped Amy back ashore after our outing to the Poor Knights, we started cruising north towards the Bay of Islands at the very northeastern tip of New Zealand. The weather is warmer and more settled here and the wind and waves have been more moderate. Good conditions for Mike and me to practice boat handling without too much stress. Navigation is interesting, due to all the islands and shoals, but we have a really cool computer program called MaxSea that runs on the computer and shows our live position and current course via GPS overlaid on accurate charts of the area. Really simplifies steering!
Every anchorage we stop over at is located in some beautiful little bay with a pleasant swim or snorkel or dinghy ride to shore and some kind of vigorous hike around the island. Since all the hiking tracks start at sea level, they all strike off directly uphill – no switchbacks in New Zealand – the path goes straight up! When you arrive at the top, the path then heads straight down again in order to allow you the privilege of climbing straight up again on the next ridge!
A storm with lots of rain was forecast but never materialized, so we have been having truly wonderful weather day after day with the exception of a five-minute downpour on our shopping day in Paihia.
Anticipating the above bad weather, we headed to civilization this past Thursday and anchored near a town named Russell. It was once quite notorious as a wild and wooly hangout for whalers and other assorted seafarers but now is peaceful and charming. Russell was the site of the so-called War of the Girls inby 1830. It started when two Maori girls got to fighting over the favors of a visiting whaling captain. Their argument deteriorated to insults and slapping, and their families joined in to avenge the insults to each side. The result was an actual war in which hundreds were killed before the local missionaries negotiated a peace settlement.
The local church is the oldest in New Zealand, scarred by musket fire and cannonball. Some of the funds for its construction were donated by Charles Darwin on his way by aboard the HMS Beagle. We joined in on $10 steak night at the local Boat Club and shopped every store in town.”
“Next morning we sailed from Great Barrier to Tutukaka, a small port town on the mainland north of Auckland. We spent a couple of nights in the marina and this afternoon we will head further north up the coast towards the Bay of Islands.
Yesterday we met up with Amy Bankoff. For those of you who don’t know her, Amy is formerly from the Phoenix area, an equestrian who as a junior rider used to ride and show my Cross Creek Farms horses for me. She emigrated to New Zealand a couple of years ago and now lives in the Tutukaka area. Believe it or not, she and I reconnected this past December around a baggage carousel at LAX, both of en route to Arizona from New Zealand for the Christmas holidays.
Amy joined us for a sail from the coast to the Poor Knights Islands. Amy is four months pregnant and we pounded through some pretty rough waves, causing a bout of seasickness. We almost turned back but fortunately Amy chose to tough it out. As soon as we anchored in the lee of the island out of the wind and waves, she revived and we all went snorkeling.
The Poor Knights are considered one of the five best diving spots in the world, according to my teenage idol Jacques Cousteau. The island group is protected as a nature reserve and the surrounding waters are a marine reserve. The water is spectacularly clear. You can stand on the deck of the boat and look down to see literally thousands of fish fifty feet below the surface.
We took our dinghy to explore the Rikoriko Cave, the largest sea cave in the world. It measures 139 meters long, 80 meters wide, and 35 meters high, as well as another 26 meters deep below the surface. The cavern has great acoustics and is regularly used for a cappella concerts. The musicians play from a boat inside the cave, and the audience floats around the entrance in their own watercraft. RikoRiko in the Maori language means ‘Dancing Light’ for the way sunlight reflecting off the surface of the sea shimmers on the ceiling of the cave
Sailing back to Tutukaka from Poor Knights was much more comfortable downwind. Amy recovered nicely and met us for dinner at a funky restaurant called Snappa Rock in the harbor. Amy’s first job after arriving in New Zealand was bartending at this very same restaurant.
This morning we are doing laundry, changing the oil (engine, generator and transmission), checking the internet, shopping and, in other words, just catching up on real life. We’re sailing out of here at noon and it may be several more days before we get back to you with the next update.”
“Between hikes our exercise consists of snorkeling – now that we have proper equipment it is all coming back quickly. I learned to scuba dive in high school in the early 60s, but it has been decades since I practiced those skills and WOW! The technology has really changed!
Anouk is a certified dive instructor and keeps a sharp eye on us, so we are in good hands with our refresher diving lessons. We will probably buy scuba tanks before the trip is over. It’s the end of the season here so maybe we’ll get some good buys. Definitely we will want dive gear when we voyage to the South Pacific this summer.
For our last day on Great Barrier, we rented a car and drove around to the east coast of the island which is exposed to the Pacific and definitely not cruiser friendly. I was the designated driver and it was a bit of a challenge. For starters, in New Zealand they drive on the opposite side of the road, as they do in the UK. I was constantly getting into the car on the wrong side and switching on the windshield wipers when I meant to activate the turn signal.
Today’s drive took us along sinuous mountain roads with lots of blind curves. The narrow roads weren’t wide enough to accommodate two cars so there was always a rush of adrenalin when we met oncoming traffic. Single-lane bridges were especially nerve-racking. The locals have a protocol for sharing them, but to us foreigners it felt more like a game of chicken.
We toured a couple of pleasant seaside towns, found a nice café for lunch, and then spent the afternoon at a bucolic beach where sheep lingered in the shade of picnic tables, and we had to wade through an estuary to get to the sand beach proper. With only one other person on the entire shoreline, we were free to enjoy the spectacular scenery and the solitude. And when it was time to leave, there was even a small shack and shower for rinsing off and changing clothes.”
“Our cruising adventures begin! Our flight arrived early on a Saturday morning. Rod met us at the airport and drove straight to Gulf Harbour where Raven awaited. The day was spent getting settled on board – unpacking suitcases, stowing our belongings, adjusting to the dramatic time zone change. New Zealand is 19 hours ahead of Tucson and we lost an entire day en route. But we’ll get it back on our return home;-).
So far the weather has been perfect and a variety of activities has kept us quite busy. The morning after our arrival, as soon as we took care of a few remaining chores and errands, we set sail for Great Barrier Island located about 40 miles east of the mainland. We anchored in Whangaparapara Harbor and took the dinghy ashore for a quick look around and a short leg-stretching walk. We spotted our first Kaka, an endangered native parrot.
Over the next few days we sailed from Whangaparapara to Smokehouse Bay where the yachties (New Zealand term) can do their laundry onshore in the provided washtubs and wringers. There is also a fire you can fuel yourself with firewood to heat up water for a hot bath. I think I will stick to Raven’s nice hot water shower and forget the communal tub! However the combo washer/dryer machine aboard the boat is currently on the fritz, so Anouk did do some scrubbing in the wash tubs and hung the laundry out to dry on Raven’s lifelines.
We took a short steep hike from Smokehouse Bay to a high spot with an inspiring view, which involved lots of huffing and puffing and good aerobic exercise. Good practice because it turned out next on the agenda was a serious hike to the highest point on the island, the summit of Mt. Hobson. We were promised an incredible view from the peak, but a drizzly wet cloud settled in and instead we got a pretty good soaking and no view at all. But successfully reaching the highest point on Great Barrier Island, some 3,000 feet above sea level, was still an accomplishment to write home about!
The final stretch to the summit was a seemingly endless staircase (800 steps – Carol counted) courtesy of the Department of Conservation. The wet conditions added to the challenge, making the steep ascent extra slippery. You can see Mike was grateful to finally reach the top! We rewarded ourselves by gobbling our sandwiches quickly, before the bread got soggy, and headed back down.
The hike took 8 hours round trip and involved some talented clawing up steep, slippery gullies, pulling ourselves up by tree roots. For sure my fitness level ticked up a notch or two. Throughout the entire trek I mentally thanked my exercise coach at the gym back home for the workouts. I could definitely feel that training kick in to save me from tumbling down the hillside.
Home again, all in one piece. A hot shower followed by a delicious dinner of wine (lots), salad, cheese and crackers – and then early to bed. High fives all around though, for having finished quite a challenge in good shape.”
“We thought we’d be able to stay in communication by email with more success than has actually been the case. Our hotel had assured us by phone that it offered internet access, but when we arrived it was non-existent. Eventually we located a wifi service named Kiwifi (which I thought was rather clever) in the harbor area. We signed up, but we have to sit in our rental car in the parking lot to get a good connection, which is not conducive to frequent cyber letters home!
December is the start of summer in New Zealand, but every day so far has been gray and cloudy, in the 60’s with blustery winds between 20 to 30 knots. They tell us it has been like this for three weeks straight! Sweater and jacket weather but not freezing cold. We didn’t go sailing until yesterday, hoping the wind would quiet down a bit. You can tell by the grin on Mike’s face that it was worth the wait! We were out on our sea trial for about 7-1/2 hours, sailing in a brisk breeze around some outer islands off the coast near Auckland. For lunch we anchored in a cove and warmed up with corn chowder cooked by Anouk and served from Raven’s galley.
The final step before finalizing the purchase (and wiring the $$$) is the survey, or pre-purchase exam. As a horse person I think of it as a vet check;-). A crew of technicians had already crawled all over the boat, from bow to stern and top (of the mast) to bottom, checking out all systems while she was berthed in her slip. But the parts underwater needed to be inspected as well. At Gulf Harbour Marina’s expansive yard, Raven was hoisted out of the water on a gigantic rolling lift to provide access for those final inspections, from hull integrity to propeller health.
While all this work was going on, we had time to take in a couple of side excursions, including a visit to Kelly Archer Boatworks, where the first prototype of the Dashews’ newly designed powerboat is under construction, an 83′ long aluminum yacht to be christened Wind Horse. A one-off boat design like this is completely built by hand, an amazing feat in these days of mass production. New Zealand is one of very few countries left in the world where skilled boat builders are capable of pulling this off.
Another memorable occasion was a visit with Jim and Cheryl Schmidt, boating friends of the Dashews who set up the introduction. The Schmidts live on country property bordering a river where their Dashew designed sailboat Wakaroa is tied up to their own private dock. Jim collects antique airplanes and we were treated to not only a tour of the hangar where he houses them, but a joyride for each of us in his vintage, circa 1928, de Havilland Gypsy Moth biplane as well. I really dig the leather helmet!
This morning I went on a two-hour hike through a park close by the Gulf Harbour Marina. It featured a spectacular coastal walk through parkland and wetlands, and then a steep uphill climb into pastures with sheep and Hereford cattle. Wildflowers in profusion colored the fields along with a scattering of large blue birds called pukeko. On the beach pohutukawa trees were in full bloom. This handsome native tree bursts into blossom around Christmas time with a blazing display of red flowers, earning it the title of New Zealand’s Christmas tree.”
For my husband Mike and me the price of admission to the cruising lifestyle was the cost of a pair of tickets to watch the University of Arizona basketball team play a home game in Tucson. At half-time we visited in the bleachers with our friends and fellow Wildcat fans Steve and Linda Dashew, legendary designers of cruising yachts. They informed us that one of their designs, a Sundeer 64 sloop christened RAVEN, had just become available for sale in New Zealand.
Mike and Steve are good friends from their mutual flying hobby, having met as members of the Tucson Soaring Club. Over the years we have had plenty of opportunity to learn about Steve’s philosophy of boat design, and we had enjoyed a weekend cruising with them aboard their 78 foot sailboat Beowulf. The hook was already set and we were an easy catch!
A few days later we were winging our way to New Zealand. It was only a couple of weeks before Christmas, and here we were headed across the Pacific to a country where spring was just turning into summer.
We spent our pre-Christmas holidays putting Raven through her paces and, as Mike phrased it, we could find no reason not be buy her. She had been beautifully loved and maintained by her previous owners and by her professional crew Rod Bradley and Anouk Reijerts. She was situated in the world’s best cruising grounds and she was ready to go adventuring. So were we – and so The Raven Logs begin!
In December of 2004 my husband Mike and I purchased the bluewater capable sailboat Raven and embarked on twelve years of adventure, exploring salt water destinations around the world. Ultimately we visited forty countries by boat, starting in the South Pacific but venturing as far as Indonesia, and closer to home along the west coast of North America from Mexico to Canada, south down the Pacific coast of Central America to transit the Panama Canal, the Caribbean, and finally the east coast of the USA. Along the way we encountered scenic vistas and island cultures far different from what we experience here at home.
Mark Twain wrote in “Innocents Abroad” about the mind-expanding benefits of travel away from your homeland:
Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things can not be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.
Another quote most often attributed to Mark Twain but actually written by H. Jackson Brown Jr. in “P.S. I Love You”:
Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.
Our voyaging days have come to an end, and although not quite twenty years have passed since we first set sail, it was well worth having lived by those words. I most certainly am not disappointed, but I am regretful that those days are behind us.
There is always some risk involved. Our captain Rod Bradley’s seamanship was so exemplary that we, and our boats, never came to harm. But unexpected storms can create havoc, yachts do capsize, uncharted coral reefs can rip out the bottom of the boat, medical emergencies can take place a thousand miles from land and the nearest doctor, and if you carelessly fall overboard the odds of being spotted, a small head bobbing between endless ocean swells, are remote. Even piracy is of some concern, more so in some parts of the world than others.
Both our cruising boats were designed by a legendary yacht designer, Steve Dashew, who also happens to be a personal friend. From his own experiences over the decades logging more than 250,000 nautical miles with just his wife and family aboard, he has written multiple magazine articles and several very thick books about boat systems and safety at sea. He is passionate about embedding safety measures into his designs. Boat speed is critical – with enough speed and modern weather reporting, it is possible to predict, outrun and avoid a storm. If inadvertently flipped upside down, the boats will right themselves – although the interior decor will certainly suffer!
When we committed to this lifestyle it was with our bodies in good health, a strong dose of optimism and perhaps a misplaced feeling of invincibility. Most of all, we put our well-placed trust in these experts whose seamanship skills surpassed ours.
Almost from day one I kept a journal online in a blog which was christened The Raven Logs and retitled The AVATAR Logs after we transitioned to our second boat AVATAR – a powerboat. The entries were written in a letters-to-home format as a means for staying in touch with family and friends while we were thousands of miles away on extended absence. At the same time, they served to create a diary of our varied adventures, preserving memories that we could look back on and enjoy again and again.
A few of my earliest efforts have been lost forever. I signed on to one of the very early cloud-based platforms and put a lot of effort into creating an attractive site to host my writings. That small startup platform was purchased by a much larger company, whose name you would recognize. My online content was summarily erased without warning and without any means of retrieval. Lesson learned – cloud computing is great and much more advanced than it was fifteen years ago – but it is a double-edged sword and loss of data can go either way!
I always felt there was a book in those blogs somewhere, but as they accumulated the project seemed more and more unwieldy. A worldwide pandemic seems like a good time to tackle the project. I am finally going back in time to revisit the stories I wrote and review the photos I took on all of our many journeys, in hopes of creating a cohesive whole that can again be enjoyed by family and friends, and anyone else who likes a seagoing adventure.
We were not sharing our expertise as seasoned sailors, which we are not. Nor are we travel experts dispensing advice on best itineraries or insights into cultural differences worldwide. The experiences we shared in our travelogs were more like ‘toe in the water’ stuff. We voyaged as tourists to far destinations and came ashore for brief visits, but always we returned to our Americanized boat with all the comforts of home – electricity and air conditioning powered by our diesel generator, fresh water produced by our state-of-the-art watermaker, scuba gear and an air compressor to refill the tanks, modern kitchen appliances and an extensive pantry of groceries purchased and stockpiled from supermarkets in more developed countries before embarking, a clothes washer and dryer, computers, satellite phone, radar and navigation equipment, and comfortable bedrooms with a thick mattress on the bed, hot water shower and flushable toilets In comparison the village mode of transportation ashore might be by hand-hewn outrigger canoe or a communal ancient pickup truck in questionable mechanical condition. Village laundry was washed in a river, and all food was either fished from the sea or grown in the village gardens. Another advantage to our offshore anchorages – they were out of flying range for the mosquitoes!
I have always been a visual person and photographs were an essential part of my communication. Photos on my blog from those early years were snapshots. Digital cameras in the early 2000s were in their infancy. For the first couple of years I was shooting with digital point and shoot cameras that produced files barely one megapixel in size. The very first interchangeable-lens DSLR to hit the market arrived in 2000. I didn’t get serious about photography until 2006 when the technology had hit its stride and I acquired my first high quality digital camera – a used Nikon from my sister who was switching to Canon (we both shoot Sony now). I had to go online to find photography courses to learn how to operate it.
As the years went by digital camera technology advanced, my skills improved, and the resulting images I captured progressed from snapshots to a career in art from photography! Today my latest and greatest Sony Alpha 1 mirrorless camera can produce image files as large as 50 megapixels at a speed of 20 or 30 frames per second. Ultimately the cruising blog morphed into a photo journal which continues to this day as I still travel and explore, camera in hand, although my floating photography platform has been replaced by travel photo workshops.
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