We departed Wellington on schedule at 5:00am this time, after a very early wake up, our earliest start for our whole adventure I think? It took us 45 minutes to exit the harbour with only a couple of inbound vessels, one a ferry and the other a ship. Once out of the harbour we headed almost due east for an hour to reach Cape Palliser, normally notoriously rough around there but Friday 27th was almost flat calm. I resisted the temptation to take another sunrise photograph as you are all probably well over them by now. I have to say though that the best place to observe a sunrise, or a sunset for that matter, is at sea, with only the clouds to influence the results! It is great to see them change - by the minute!
Robin was relaxing (cat napping) on the lounger upstairs and was due on the helm at 9:00am for his 4 hours or so. I was ready for food again by then, as we had just cereal for breakfast and that was at 4:30am! Robin did some toast and a cup of tea for us. Once he took over, I went and took a shower..... at 18 knots, it was that smooth out there today. It was quite cool looking out the rear shower window at our wake disappearing into the background. We encountered lots of seals and Dolphin on this trip and also came across many large boil ups (fish chasing bait-fish and birds chasing bait-fish) - I was so tempted to stop and fish but we needed to arrive before dark. There were guaranteed fish beneath these Boil-ups. Interestingly, for me anyway, the seals lie on their backs with their two rear flippers touching each other and one front flipper touching their two rear flippers. They were clearly basking in the sun, soaking up the heat via their black flippers but they always had one flipper (usually the right front flipper) in the water for balance and ready to spring into action if a predatory fish, such as a shark, came upon them. Apparently they are constantly on the lookout for sharks while lying in this position. Occasionally they would allow us to come extremely close before springing into action to get out of the way, almost as if they were sleeping? The coastline is so rugged and unique heading North - I actually really liked the unspoilt rugged terrain. Much of the coastline is unchartered out to about 2Nm off the shoreline reflecting the fact that it is riddled with rocks all the way up to Napier really, so only locals would navigate in small vessels with local knowledge, from the little settlements all the way North. There is certainly nowhere to hide in rough conditions on this coast which is why we wanted near perfect weather for this leg.
The geography was typically like this on the coastline as we got up towards Hastings
The further North the more interesting the geography is in these parts, as you can see from the photographs. It was good having Robin on the helm while I completed my blog for the previous trip. I was also able to take some photos of the coastline and Islands. I took over an hour from Napier just to do the radio calls to the port and Coastguard to close my trip report. Got no replies from either so ended up calling Napier Maritime radio to close our trip report. All the while heading in at 18 - 19 knots, we knew roughly where we needed to go and proceeded into the Marina at Ahuriri. We were in pole position and headed in to berth on our port side, however just as I came alongside I spotted the power box which indicated that we would need to reverse in, based on our power cable length. So I reversed out, spun around and reversed back in which worked out really well for tying off the boat. It was only 2.5 metres deep so we stirred up the silt on the bottom from our prop wash turning the water a dirty brown. We needed shore power, as the genset had tripped out on the way up the coast when boiling the jug indicating that we probably had an impeller failure? Basically it had been run so hard for so long that it needed the water pump impeller to be replaced and also the fan belt which by now was well worn too. It wasn’t broken but again I like to replace before failure, not as a result of failure! We didn’t realise how many hours were being clocked up! The good news was that we carried spares of both items, so I actually enjoyed the job of replacing them the following morning and getting it running perfectly again. Thankfully the genset has great safety protection shutdown devices that prevent any serious damage being done in these events - you simply cannot run the genset until the unit functions normally again.
Motu-O- Kura or (Bare Island) has the very similar geography as the the shoreline. It looking striking in the afternoon sun. This is near Waimarama Hawkes Bay.
After washing the boat down, we visited the local pub to find out who was responsible for the Marina and naturally decided to have a beer while we were there! We spotted the publican on our boat, clearly looking for us, so I popped outside to introduce myself. Archie was very helpful and said he would put the power on for us, as it was supplied via the pubs own power supply, due to some historic connection to this berth. The berth is now run by the local sailing club. Afterwards, I even cooked dinner rather than take the soft option of dinner at the restaurant above! We retired early, as usual, but it had been a long trip (12 Hours at 18 knots), we arrived at 5:00pm exactly as predicting by the boating avionics app. We must surprise coastguard with the accuracy of our ETA’s (estimated time of arrival) over such very long voyages.
Horizon III after thousands of sea miles, still looking sharp, outside the Blue Water Bar - Ahuriri