Author: John

Posted by John

We did not sign up for this. The plan was for an endless summer until we were back home in our own house again. But the summer ended early and it’s now going on winter here. We are stuck in a place we were supposed to be gone from by now. We don’t want to be here, and the government doesn’t want us to be here either. They have told us so in no uncertain terms.

When we returned because we could not go on to Tahiti, they canceled our departure paperwork. It’s like we never left. So the fact we did leave was erased, which left nothing but a then already overstayed visa. When told by Customs to just go online and extend our visas, well… It turns out you can’t extend what you don’t have. They expired after we left and before we got back. The system rejects your application with no reason given as to why. The fine print of the law says that Immigration doesn’t have to give a reason for rejection, nor are they required to read any “notes” added to your file. The process does allow for lengthy written explanations from each of us, explaining why we haven’t left yet. As of now, it is all uncertain.

We’ve had time to look over the boat. It’s broken more than we first realized. The forestay, a 1/2 or 7/16 inch steel cable, snapped right at the fitting at the top of the mast. We’re happy that it was the cable and not part of the mast that broke. That loose cable then flew around and hit the top of the mizzen mast, doing some damage there before we could cut it loose, resulting in the total loss of the jib sail, the jib furler, the jib halyard (they’re not cheap) and plenty of cosmetic damage when it all smashed into various things. We realize it could’ve been much, much worse.

We also lost TWO major components of our self-steering system, including a part that bolts to the rudder itself. This was a real discouraging discovery since the boat needs to be hauled out in order to replace it. At the time of discovery, it felt like a deal killer. We also lost several items overboard including two boat hooks, one of which was really nice, and other miscellaneous items.

But we do have a plan. All three of us will fly home in late July or early August, but the boat will literally be stuck in a hole in the ground at Vuda Point Marina in Fiji. We are still waiting on the cost estimate for this, but we’ve been in contact with them already. It’s not that the boat gets buried (not yet, anyway), but it does get taken out of the water and put on dry land, with the keel propped up in a hole. It’s all part of an insurance-approved “hurricane hole.” The boat would then spend the cyclone season there, without us, but being monitored and cared for by the marina staff.

In the meantime, the sail maker here is already working on a new sail for us. The rigger is waiting delivery of our new furling system, and parts for the self-steering are being shipped from California. Once they’ve arrived, there’s cutting and welding and drilling that needs to be done, but the local representative for Saye’s Rig is on top of everything. Likely, the underwater parts won’t be installed here, but will wait until we get to Fiji. We have to be hauled out there anyway. We think we can probably hand steer to Fiji, it’s “only” 1,200 miles or so.

As long as we’re still stuck here anyway, we managed to get the intermittent starter motor to the recommended Galbraith’s Auto Electric (I was close, remembering his name as Gary, or Glen). He found that the solenoid was put together wrong—the “pull-in” winding was reversed with the “hold-in” winding. It’s apparently been that way since we originally bought it, and was easily corrected by swapping a part around. We were extremely hopeful when it started without problem the first two times, but then came the big letdown when it was intermittent for the third start. This past week has been up and down like that. Maybe, since we’re spending the big bucks anyway, we should just throw in a new starter motor as well.

Our goal is to get the new sail and rigging working and get the boat to Fiji as soon as possible. Then we can come home and get our lives back to normal, for eight or nine months anyway. We’ve all been spooked a little, but the time at home will give us space to work out a plan for getting the boat the rest of the way home next year.

It wouldn’t be the ending we’d planned for this trip, but on the bright side, I’ve always wanted to go to Fiji.

Bula!

Posted by John

It’s like we never left. But we did. We just didn’t get very far.

We were rushed at the end, planning to leave on April 30th. There were many projects to finish. Sewing new sail covers and our new dodger, with a new, not-yet-sun-degraded, clear vinyl windshield that we could actually see through and open a section of for those really hot days, took several all-nighters with rolls of “Sunbrella” spread across the floor of the visitor lounge. Organizing and stowing a month’s worth of food always takes time. We sold the car. We prepaid bank fees because we’d be in the middle of the ocean when they came due (“But you don’t currently owe a balance, why are you trying to pay now?”). We lined up “Tahiti Crew” to handle the paperwork to get us smoothly into French Polynesia, and former New Zealand weather service employee “Met Bob” to provide weather guidance along the way.

Finally, after discussing the symptoms with several people over a period of months, I was convinced that a worsening problem with our starter motor was a “dead spot in the stator,” and if we could just take it to Gary (or was it Glen?) just down the road on the way to Kerikeri, he’d have it fixed right in about twenty minutes. But it was too late. It was time to leave.

The marina wanted us out of the slip or they’d have to charge us for another day. We had to stop at the marina fuel dock, fill up, and take the receipt, Customs departure paperwork, and Robyn’s debit card back to the marina office to get the GST refunded before the office closed for the day, and we wanted to be out of the bay and sailing before dark. Clay and Jill from Me Too came over to help us get out of the slip and into the fuel dock. Then we were off. Even then, there was a rush to finish up some tax forms before we were out of the bay and cell phone data range. They were associated with Robyn’s bank account and must be submitted within a few weeks. They had just arrived.

On the Friday before we left, there was a party in the Opua Community Hall, organized by Jill, for all the departing cruisers. There was likely a hundred people there. Music was provided by a band made up of musicians from various boats. Even the sound system was set up by Dan, a professional movie sound engineer from Toronto, who is making a documentary about his cruise around the world. The band even included ten year old Martin playing a Peruvian pan pipe.

We first met Martin last year on Nuku Hiva. He and his family had sailed from Ecuador. Martin’s dad is from California, his mother is from Peru, but Martin and his little brother can best be described as global citizens. We’ve seen Martin swimming with his Tongan friends in Tonga, riding bikes around the marina with his Scandinavian friends, speaking French with his buddies on Bora Bora and playing computer games in the visitor lounge with American kids. We have met so many people whose day-to-day experiences would normally qualify as extraordinary, and we feel privileged to be an accepted member of this unique, and even somewhat elite community.

But, with our two years just about up, it was time to head home. We sailed out of New Zealand and into the sunset (literally), and off to new adventures. Unfortunately, the adventure we got was not the one we expected.

The first night we sailed through a squall with heavy rain and lightning. Never pleasant in a boat, but thunder, if there was any, could not be heard above the wind. It didn’t feel like getting hit by a lightning bolt was imminent. The lightning was merely flashes in an otherwise dark sky. The storm passed.

We had sailed all night on the staysail alone, but the wind seemed to be dying, and we wanted to go a little faster. We furled up the staysail and let out the larger jib. As hoped, our speed increased a little.

Since Tahiti is east of New Zealand, and the tropical trade winds blow from the east, the plan was to stay south of the tropics, catching whatever westerly wind there was for maybe a thousand miles before angling back to the northwest, across the trade winds, to arrive at Tahiti. The ideal situation would be to leave just as a low pressure system crossed northern New Zealand, and get a boost from the rotating winds—clockwise in the southern hemisphere—above the storm center. These were exactly the predicted conditions for April 30th, which just happened to be the last day we could be in New Zealand without another visa extension.

So we were relaxing into our second day, looking forward to returning to warm and sunny Tahiti, then warm and sunny Hawaii, and then a warm and sunny late July arrival home, when the horizon ahead of us did not look quite right. As a matter of fact, this whole departure from New Zealand had not felt quite right. We were all cranky, tired, stressed and seemed to have other places we wanted to be.

A weather update from Met Bob gave us a new heading along with a “GALE WARNING.” The GRIB file we retrieved from SailDocs showed us heading into high winds. We made the course correction, but the seas were already quite large and the winds high. The new heading was not entirely achievable with the jib alone, but we didn’t want any more sail up with the worsening weather. We were already taking a few waves into the cockpit. The good news was the wind should be abating in the morning. We stuck it out for the night.

At one point during the night, I looked out at a hazy moon-lit scene of what appeared to be a broad valley. The normal jumble of mountain-peak waves and holes had been replaced by this smooth valley floor. We were entering the valley—a 46,000 pound boat surfing, at up to fifteen knots, down the face of a giant wave. The boat shuddered on the way down. Then we climbed out of the valley, not on a mountain slope, but on the back of another giant wave. It was scary and awesome at the same time. Exhilarating.

As the night wore on, so did the noise. The wind, the banging and clanging, moaning and squeaking and rattling. It never ends. Sometimes we’d have to yell just to hear each other a few feet away. Waves slammed into the cockpit. Waves slammed down on the forward hatch, which was not sealed tightly enough, and rained water down into the head until we could get the sun cover off the corners of the hatch, and dog it down all the way. The same thing happened in the aft cabin, soaking most of our clean clothes and blankets before we knew it. Waves slammed into the cabin window seals, the air vents and the heater chimney. The cabin floor was slick with salt water, and combined with wet feet, wet hands and sudden movements of the boat, it was almost impossible to move around without being bashed against something. We all have the bruises to prove it.

A problem we’ve had before with the jib roller furler had happened again. Normally, when we pull in the furler line it rotates the drum, rolling up the sail. But the screws connecting the drum to the foil sometimes fall out. We had just had a professional rigger replace the screws, yet the problem occurred again. We could not furl in the jib. It would have to stay deployed until we could get out onto the bowsprit and replace the screws somehow, or pull down the jib by hand and secure it to the deck. Neither would be happening before the conditions calmed. Just like in the movies, waves were sweeping across the deck.

In the morning the storm did not abate as promised. We hit wind gusts of nearly fifty knots, with sustained winds over forty for long periods. At one point, the entire port side of the boat was underwater with the ocean pouring into the cockpit. It was an unsettling, unforgettable sight. We broke all of our records for boat speed, wind speed, heel angle, amount of water in the boat, as well as personal miserability index. But we were heading toward Tahiti where everything could be made right. In a few weeks I’d be eating a $30 cheeseburger and sucking down Tahitian beer at a sidewalk cafe in downtown Papeete. Mentally, I was already there. Perhaps I’d jumped the gun.

At some point all of this becomes the new normal. Exhaustion eventually leads to sleep, even if only in short bursts. But something was wrong with the jib. It was too loose—luffing badly. We tried to winch it in, but it wouldn’t tighten up. That’s when one of us noticed that the top of the furler was broken, hanging loose, dangling. In fact, the jib was hanging by its halyard. We tried to lower the sail, if for no other reason than to relieve some pressure on it. But as soon as we started to loosen the halyard, the furler foil, which runs the length of the forestay, buckled. As soon as it buckled, the jib tore in half, then shredded. Pieces came off and fell into the ocean.

The forestay became a wildly loose, half-inch diameter, fifty-foot steel cable with a bit of sail attached like a kite to the end, whipping around the boat just above our heads, dipping and flying, trying to wrap around and take out everything in its path. It was a disaster unfolding before our eyes.

We had already started the engine, somewhat miraculously considering our questionable starter. There was so much wind noise, I only knew the engine had started by the RPMs on the tach. Robyn steered. Julie, tethered to jack lines, made her way out, all the way to the end of the bowsprit with tools in hand to disconnect the stay. I tried to corral the wild end of the beast before it took out the wind generator (which worked awesomely in 40 knot wind, by the way), or damaged more of the rigging, or us. It seemed to take forever.

We were entering a lonely area of the ocean that was recently deemed as safe a place as any for a falling space station to crash to Earth because there’s nothing and no one there for it to hit. Julie was riding the bowsprit and disappearing into waves as if holding onto the back of some kind of fantastical dolphin, while I (of course) was trying to slay the dragon, or at least release its halyard leash. It was tough and fought back. How else can I describe it?

Eventually, we cut the raging beast free. Robyn steered so as to not entangle the prop in its shredded remains as the last of it sank below the surface. Julie attached a spare halyard to the bowsprit so that we could apply pressure with the winch to keep the mast upright. We could not continue on to Tahiti. We could not risk sailing with such damaged rigging. We could only go sadly back to New Zealand under engine power.

We got a message off to NZ Customs that we were coming back for emergency repairs, and to please notify us of the procedure. Then we started to realize the damage done. There were things we had carried on deck that we no longer had on board, apparently having been washed overboard. We were missing a vital component of our self-steering system. Our electronic autopilot has not been fully functional for most of this trip, so we would have to continuously hand steer for two days back to the marina. Although, Julie did rig up some bungee cords on the wheel that worked pretty well for a while.

We know we need thousands of dollars in repairs. We need professional expertise assessing the damage. We may submit an insurance claim if it’s appropriate. We need to clean up and dry out the boat. We just don’t know where or when these repairs will take place. None of this changes the fact we need to be home in August. Robyn is more than ready to go off to school, and we need to earn some money, somehow.

We entered the Bay of Islands at dawn with a beautiful sunrise behind us. We were greeted by dolphins. Some were so close that they seemed to rub along the side of the boat. The thought crossed my mind that maybe they were trying to turn us around, send us back out to sea. But I kind of want to lie beneath a tree somewhere and stare at the sky instead.

Jill contacted us on the radio, confirmed the availability with the marina for the same slip we had before, then met us there to help us tie up.

We spent most of the day talking to people who had heard we were back. Many seemed genuinely impressed that we had saved ourselves from being dis-masted; that we had survived at all. “Come on, it wasn’t that bad. Really.”

Even Dan, from My Dream, from Kirkland, Washington, who we first met on the island of Ua Pou and last saw in Tonga, came by the boat to say he was here, but leaving to go home. He was planning on going the same route we had planned: Tahiti, Hawaii, Puget Sound. If only. A buddy boat opportunity lost.

We met with the Customs official. We were unsure if we had crossed the 200 mile territorial limit or not. We were close, but didn’t get an exact location when everything took place. I wasn’t even aware that we had actually turned around while we were dealing with the jib. She decided we had not left territorial waters and therefore had not actually left New Zealand, and therefore could not issue us new entry visas. Instead, she canceled our departure clearance. It’s as if we never left. However, our visas had expired at the end of April. We have now overstayed. She made a note in our file to prevent us from being arrested and deported. But, come Monday, we have to apply for another extension.

And, come Monday, our full time job becomes figuring out what went wrong, how much the total damage is, what, exactly, we lost overboard, and most importantly, where we go from here.

This is not how the story ends. We hope.

Posted by John

Our time in New Zealand is about over. We’ve been busy. We’ll probably be gone by April 30th, so we thought we should say something before we go out of Wi-Fi range on our most ambitious sailing attempt so far. If we successfully pull it off, then I think we can truly qualify as ocean sailors.

Our plan is to sail from here to Tahiti in one shot. Then Tahiti to Hawaii. Then from Hawaii to Puget Sound, and home. We want to be home by early August. That’s three months of nearly continuous sailing. Should be a summer to remember.

We don’t have a lot of pictures for this post, unless you’d like to see our newly installed alternator, or how many parts make up a sail winch, all of which need periodic cleaning and lubing.

We still have so many projects to complete, including finding a buyer for our car, and getting parts of the main boom back from the rigger, and putting the sails back on. We’re also shopping for a new starter battery, trying to fix a sewing machine and contemplating drilling and tapping some holes at the top of the mizzen mast.

It’s not all about the boat. When Robyn had a birthday a few months ago, the New Zealand government no longer recognized her as a dependent of her parents. In order to extend her visa, she had to prove she wasn’t destitute. So, she opened an account in a local bank, the balance of which counted as “proof of funds.” There’s probably a form of some kind in her future where she’ll have to answer “Yes” to the question: “Have you ever held funds in a foreign bank?” The bonus is she now has a debit card that actually works at unattended gas stations, where U.S. bank cards do not. This is the only way we can fill up the boat with duty-free diesel, which we can only buy at the unattended fuel dock on our way out of the country.

We’ve had so many, mostly unexpected, “fun” experiences in recent weeks. We tried to get a propane tank filled, but our tank wasn’t certified in New Zealand, and was too old to be certified in New Zealand. This resulted in an afternoon of trying to transfer propane from one small tank to another, listening for it trickling into the empty tank, while parked in a parking lot next to a waterfall. Several chickens found what we were doing to be apparently interesting, but, oddly we seemed to be mostly ignored by the people who came to the same parking lot to take a short walk to see a waterfall. But all of this is really a story for another time. Two of us went to the eye doctor for new eyeglass and contact lens prescriptions, and two of us went to the dentist to get a broken tooth and missing fillings fixed. Sometimes it feels like we should be living here. In fact, the internet has it all figured out, which is probably why it’s constantly asking me to “Click HERE to see if you qualify for a USA Green Card.” I do find these ads a little disconcerting at times. As far as I know, I’m still a U.S. citizen, but these days, you never really know.

Many of the people we’ve met since sailing out of Puget Sound we now consider to be friends. When we’re listening to each other’s stories, we can all relate. We’ve all been through the same stuff. But it’s a little strange when we talk about what comes next. Most are continuing on, to somewhere. Their plans are open-ended, heading generally west: Australia; Malaysia; Japan; Singapore; Indonesia; Madagascar; the Red Sea; the Mediterranean. Our friends talk about taking their boats and sailing to other continents with the same matter-of-fact casualness as other people talk about taking their car on a summer vacation to Yellowstone. But for us, we’re done. We’re going home.

Robyn is going to school in Olympia in September. She’s busy looking at housing options and meal plans, and which classes she can take first. We’ve got business at home. We hope our mail carrier will be offering puppies again this year, because we can’t wait to get one. But, we almost feel like quitters among our friends.

Then we remember that we set out in August two years ago with a two-year plan to sail down the coast to Mexico, then make a 3,000 mile crossing to the Marquesas, then sail to Tahiti, and across the South Pacific all the way to New Zealand. Many people we told our plans to two years ago were skeptical. At times, we were too. But then we went out and did it. We’re not quitters at all. We’re just a few months (and a zillion ocean miles) from complete success, and home.

Saying goodbye is always hard, but there’s no place like home.

I wasn’t kidding. This project started as a “What if.” The alternator was jammed between the heat exchanger (blue cylinder thing with the label) and the maximum outside end of the alternator arm. Changing a broken belt at sea would be tough, requiring disassembly of several parts. All we wanted to do was get a longer arm and a bigger belt. But this is a boat, and we’re in New Zealand, so nothing can be that simple. New alternator on a homemade arm extender, with a longer belt that we had shipped from Australia. We got a spare belt, too. Works great.

These are the parts that come out of a winch. Maintenance consists of cleaning, oiling and greasing. Without working too hard, it takes about a day for each one. We have ten winches.

Posted by John

After spending part of the morning in a coffee shop in Nelson at the north end of the south island, we drove away with two new rear tires on the car and a bag of freshly ground coffee in the trunk. As a bonus, we had four hubcaps on the wheels again. The spare tire may have had a screw in it, but it also had its own hubcap. This replaced the one we had lost within a day or two of buying the car. Unfortunately, this one didn’t last long either. We don’t know when or where, but it, too, fell off. It took a few days to notice it was missing, we were so used to the three-hubcap look.

From Nelson, we drove along Queen Charlotte Sound to Picton. Like so many roads we’ve driven in New Zealand, this one was also narrow, winding, and had many precipitous drops off the edge. Maybe our hubcap flew off a cliff somewhere. Picton is where the ferry is for crossing back to the north island. We had a room reservation for the night, and at check-in we were given forms to fill out for the New Zealand census. Everyone was to be counted on March 6th. “But we aren’t… We don’t…” No worries. Once we answered the questions about country of permanent residence and length of stay in New Zealand, we got to jump to the end and skip the pages of questions in between.

With free Wi-Fi in the room, we checked the weather websites and learned that cyclone Hola, which had been floating around in the tropics as a rumor, was now an actual cyclone on a path toward New Zealand. There was still a lot of uncertainty as to its exact direction, but it was aiming for the north part of the north island.

The ferry ride across Cook Strait takes about three hours which, I believe, is just a bit longer than the check-in and boarding process. Rental cars don’t go on the ferry. They get turned in on one side and replaced with a different car on the other. Many semi trucks just load the trailer on board, not the cab. A different driver takes it on the other side. Even though our car was no bigger than a motorcycle space, the ferry ticket, reserved for a specific sailing and paid well in advance, still cost a shocking amount. On the crossing we were treated to low clouds, strong wind, heavy rain, and three-meter waves. It was most interesting to be able to look down on ten foot waves from a warm lounge, rather than up at them from the terror of our wet cockpit.

Once across to the north island we stopped at Rivendell, from the Lord of the Rings movies. It was raining hard. Other than a nice area of old forest, there wasn’t much there except a fake stone movie prop surrounded by twenty years of new vegetation. One sign in front of some ferns and bushes explained how we were looking at Frodo’s bedroom. Okay. It also said that most of the “structures” in the movie were digitally added after filming.

At this point of the trip our main schedule driver was an appointment for Robyn to take the SAT in Auckland in a couple of days. Her college admission back home was awaiting the results. We had a lot of driving to do. From Rivendell, we drove nonstop to Hastings, arriving after dark. The next morning we took off for Rotorua. It had started raining heavily during the night, and after about an hour on the road we learned that our route was closed by landslides and flooding. We selected an alternate, longer route, but ran into police turning cars around there, too. We drove back to Hastings to come up with a Plan “C.” Robyn had to be taking her test in Auckland in 42 hours. We looked at the weather reports and the weather radar on the internet, and saw that we might be able to escape the heaviest rain and still make it to Rotorua if we drove back the way we came toward Wellington, and then took the same highway we had come south on originally, back to the north.

We drove through very heavy rain. It was so dark, and the visibility so poor, it was hard to believe it was midday in the summer. We finally came out of it and arrived in Rotorua after dark. Rotorua is like a miniature Yellowstone, with geysers, bubbling mud and steaming lakes. Unfortunately, we also ran into entrance fees and scheduled guided tours of various lengths and costs, each “allowing time for photo stops.” We didn’t have all day to ooh and ah and snap pictures with the crowds. But we did manage to find a free area, down a gravel road, where steaming water comes out of the ground, fills a steaming lake, and flows through the forest in a warm stream. Not spectacular to look at, but it seemed to be well enjoyed by locals.

We finally made it back to Auckland, got Robyn to her test on time early Saturday morning, and then drove back to Opua and the boat. We got there just in time to see that cyclone Hola was on a direct path for the eye to pass right over the Bay of Islands early Monday morning, with a rain intensity of PURPLE (that’s way heavier than RED, which is itself very heavy). This would be cyclone number three, in this place we came to in order to avoid them in the first place. “Very unusual year,” everybody says. But by Sunday afternoon it looked like the worst might pass by offshore. In the satellite images it even looked like it was breaking up, or at least losing its tight little spiral. It ended up being no big deal, especially if you can handle a typical winter storm in Seattle.

So, we came, we drove, we saw. It seems that just about everywhere we looked in New Zealand we saw a picture postcard view. The green fields seem to glow, and at almost every turn a new, often surprising, vista opens up. The terrain and the views may never get old, but the long days in the car do. The break was nice, but we’re happy to be back at the boat. Besides, the marina shuffled us to a different slip the day after the storm. When we went to move the car closer to our new location, it wouldn’t start. It probably needs a rest now, too.

Posted by John

At Fortrose, at the south end of the south island of New Zealand, we camped on the shore of Toetoes Bay and nearly got blown away during the night. Our cheap tent only looked like one that could handle the weather conditions of Mt. Everest base camp, but in reality, we knew it could not. As the wind increased and the situation continued to worsen, we lay awake formulating a plan of escape. We were certain it was only a matter of time before either the seams started ripping out, or we’d be inundated by blowing sand and crashing waves. We executed our escape just as soon as we had enough daylight to see. Fortunately, our tent did not take off and fly away like an inflated bouncy house.

We drove to Invercargill, and then out to Bluff, before finding a cafe open for breakfast. Bluff was dark, windy, and felt like the bottom of the world. After some coffee, we turned around and headed north, up the west coast of the south island, and on to Fiordland and Milford Sound.

Milford Sound is where pyramid-shaped Mitre Peak rises from the water’s edge in the iconic image of New Zealand as a remote, quiet, unspoiled land. We had hoped to spend a few days there, to maybe even take a boat tour, but we went at the height of summer tourist season and barely even found a place to park, much less a place to camp.

The road to Milford Sound is a mountain road with views of many waterfalls and high, hanging glaciers on steep, rocky peaks. The road winds up into a steep valley until it looks like there is no way out. Sure enough, there is a tunnel dug right through the rock ridge at the head of the valley. Traffic only goes one way at a time, controlled by stoplights, and the tunnel, hacked out of solid rock, is one of the spookiest I’ve experienced. Once inside the mountain, the road angles downward for some distance until it finally pops out high up a cliff on the other side of the pass. It switchbacks down from there. At the bottom are parking lots full of huge tour buses, crowds of people, tour boats, and an airstrip with sightseeing flights and helicopters taking off and landing continuously. The scenery is spectacular, but quiet and unspoiled it is not.

With no place to spend the night, we turned around and went back up through the tunnel and down the valley on the other side until finally finding a campsite just before dark. It cost us $45 to put up our tent. There was no drinkable water, and we had to take our rubbish with us. After Milford, we continued up the west coast, through Queenstown (nice, but no place to park) and on to Fox Glacier (road washed out), Franz Josef Glacier, and three nights on the Tasman Sea coast at Greymouth and Westport. We left Westport on our way to Nelson, but found ourselves up the river without a spare, in a one tow truck town.

Our little Holden Barina, once we had worked out a way to fit everything into it, had done us good up to this point. But we really should’ve checked the spare tire—or tyre, as they’re called here—when we bought it. We were going up the Buller River, which is a long (100 kilometers between petrol stations), winding road through a sometimes narrow, steep-sided gorge (gorgeous gorge?). Most roads in New Zealand are just two lanes, except for short sections where there is an extra passing lane. But those extra lanes are often canceled out by the many single lane bridges and road sections that are only one lane, with traffic alternating in each direction. The road through the Buller Gorge has many such sections, including one where the single lane is carved out of a rock face like half a tunnel. It was not far beyond this spot where our left rear tyre decided to start peeling off tread and become flappy. Kind of like a shoe with the sole coming off. The only place we could pull over was on the wrong side of the road. We took everything out of the back of the car and piled it onto the shoulder. We found the spare and pulled it out. We found the lug wrench. We could not find the jack. We had bought a used car, took it on a long road trip, and never even looked to see if we had a jack—or any tools, for that matter.

The traffic zoomed by. Sometimes they honked, maybe because we were on the wrong side of the road? But no one stopped. There was no phone service. We put everything back into the car, turned on the flashers, and drove real slowly, waving cars past when they bunched up behind us, and pulling over wherever we could. The road had many worrisome blind curves. We came across a lime works with an office—the door was wide open—and a pickup truck parked in front. No one was around. I went into the office, but the only people there were the many pictures of women on the many calendars hanging on the wall. The ground was all covered with a deep, slimy, white, lime mud which got onto everything. We limped on, eventually coming to a parking lot for “New Zealand’s longest swing bridge,” which you can walk across for $5 per person, and for an extra fee, ride the zip line back in the other direction.

We borrowed a jack from a European tourist couple in the parking lot, got the bad tyre off the car, put on the spare, lowered the car back down, and watched as the spare squished down to the rim. Huh, there was zero air pressure in it. We next found a couple from North Carolina who had bicycles on a rack on the back of their camper van. He was wearing a T-shirt from Orcas Island, WA. Our lucky day. They had two bicycle pumps, but apparently, at some time since I was a kid, they’ve changed bicycle tire valves so that they are no longer the same as car tyre valves. The bicycle pump didn’t fit our tyre valve. One of the staff at the swing bridge offered to call the tow truck from the next town on his landline phone, but it turned out that the only tow truck had already been sent out on a call.

We were able to borrow another jack from another European couple in another rented camper van, swap the flat spare out with the flappy-treaded tyre, and reload everything we had removed from the back of the car into it again. We turned on our flashers and drove—at about 20 mph—with two tyres on the shoulder, one of which continuously flapped, the 14 kilometers to the Mobil station in Murchison. It wasn’t a full-service station, just pumps and a convenience store, but it had an air kiosk. We took everything out of the car once again, pulled out the spare, and pumped it up. Then I went on foot in search of the hardware store where people thought we might be able to find a car jack. They did have one. Just one. Our lucky day. By the time I got back to the car, the tyre pressure was down by more than 10 psi. Of course, there was a reason that the spare in the trunk had been flat. It had a screw stuck in it.

The Mobil convenience store had a can of Fix-A-Flat. We left the screw in the tyre because we had no pliers to pull it out with. We jacked up the car and took the bad tyre off—still covered with lime slime, and put the leaking spare on again. We emptied the can of Fix-A-Flat into the tyre, bought some cold drinks from the store, and continued on to Nelson. The tyre didn’t leak at all. In the morning we bought two new tyres to go with our new jack, and then headed out on the road again.

Such are the joys of road tripping. We’re almost ready to start thinking about going back out on the open ocean again. But we still have a little more driving to do.

Posted by John

We came to New Zealand to sit out the cyclone season, do some work on the boat and see some of the country. But boat work is never done. Each project just leads to more. And apparently, New Zealand is not entirely immune to cyclones, either.

The first cyclone to affect us, Fehi, dropped a ton of rain and delayed getting our bottom painting finished. Flooding and slides (they call them slips, here) closed a few roads. But it was cyclone Gita that had the bigger impact. It hit Samoa, then, sadly, according to the UK Daily Mail, pretty much destroyed one of our favorite places—Big Mama’s, on Pangaimotu island in Tonga, not to mention the heavy damage to the Nuku’alofa waterfront. It’s hard to think about that, having just passed through there, enjoying it so much.

The crazy thing about Gita was the “S” turns it took across the ocean, going first one way, and then back another, until it was aiming right at the middle of New Zealand. No longer a tropical cyclone, but still a cyclone all the same, the weather forecasts were getting more serious. Spurred on by already scheduled appointments in March, including the marina shuffling us from one slip to another, we decided that if we were going to do our road trip at all, we should get as far south as we could, as quickly as we could. Loading up our tiny car was like figuring out a Chinese puzzle. Then we left for Wellington, with an overnight campout along the way, and took the ferry across Cook Strait in the dark.

We made it as far as Christchurch before the storm hit. Instead of being south of the storm, luck would have it we were right in it’s path. The government declared a state of emergency in Christchurch just prior to our arrival, and we heard warnings that “Trampers, campers and boaties” should evacuate Marlborough Sound, on Cook Strait.

Christchurch is on the east coast, and Gita was approaching from the west, so no one was too worried about high wind where we were, but there was a substantial amount of rain for two days which caused some flooding. We spent those two nights in a motel, with one day shopping in Christchurch, and the other day getting our brakes fixed. However, Christchurch, and the highway we took to get there, were heavily damaged in a 2014 earthquake. The highway along the coast is still being rebuilt. We had gone through many construction zones to get to Christchurch, and now we were learning that the road was closed again, with new slips. We were happy to have gotten through before the closures. If all that wasn’t crazy enough, hitting New Zealand briefly broke up Gita into TWO storms. But, that was, finally, the end of Gita.

The sun came out, we put on our sunnies, and continued south. If nothing else, New Zealand is certainly scenic.

Posted by John

It was bound to happen. After doing this for a while, sooner or later it has to be inevitable (right?) that there would be a post with no title.

Because—between rain storms—we painted the bottom of the boat blue, I thought about calling it “Boatyard Blues.” I also thought about calling it “Boat of Many Colors” because before the final two coats of blue ablative anti-foul paint, we put on two coats of gray (silver-ish) primer/sealer, followed by a bright red, hard, anti-foul “indicator” coat.

The purpose of the indicator coat is, if you start to see red on the boat bottom, it’s time to repaint the blue. We had the bottom wiped and scraped and scrubbed so many times on the way down here that we were afraid there wasn’t much anti-fouling paint left. So we power sanded the bottom and, at $200 to $300 per gallon, and one to two gallons per coat, and three different types of bottom paint, we spent our cash stash and painted, painted, painted.

We also worked on a permanent fix to the water that finds its way inside the rudder, gave up, and kicked that can down the road again (mainly because it’s going to take some time to dry out all the water that’s already in there). Since our boot stripe (just above the water line) pretty much peeled off somewhere between Mexico and Tonga, we also completely sanded the rest of that thing off, put primer on, and repainted it. And we had a machine shop make more of the special bolts, including spares this time, that hold the bracket on the rudder for the self-steering system. We know these bolts are only temporary. They are highly susceptible to crevice corrosion. We planned to have the bolts made out of silicon bronze instead of stainless steel, but we were talked out of that by someone who knows more about the steering system than we do. Someday, back home, we’ll find a permanent solution.

We didn’t even get to half our boatyard wish list, but living for more than three weeks on a boat propped up by sticks on dry land in an industrial work zone, and climbing up and down a ladder all day, gets old in a hurry. We didn’t plan to be here three weeks, but we also didn’t plan on all these rain storms, including the former cyclone Fehi. Now they are warning about the potential for a bigger and stronger cyclone Gita.

The fun part of all this was, each time we put a different color on the bottom we’d get lots of compliments on how nice it looked: “Wow, I like the silver.” Then we’d paint it a different color.

Posted by John

Several days ago Edd from the boat Windrose said, “Interesting concept of summer here.” Edd is from California. But even by Seattle standards, the last three weeks have been frustratingly wet and stormy. In one storm we had steady winds of over 40 knots, with higher gusts. That’s a major winter storm in Seattle, bringing down trees and power lines. It was scary just to walk down the dock. The gusts were almost strong enough to knock me off into the water. Unlike at home, where storms tend to last several hours, here they seem to last for days. The first storm ended and the sun came out and it was hot for a few days, but then another storm came. The second storm had slightly less wind (30 knots), but much higher quantities of rain. I’m absolutely sure that we got more rain in three days here than Seattle gets in a whole summer. It was the second storm that was the most worrisome for us. We had a scheduled haulout, and the predictions, even five days in advance, were for the wind and rain to continue until the exact hour of our haulout.

New Zealand has apparently privatized its weather service. I don’t know how the business model works, but MetService.com forecasts are free for non-commercial use. They also seem to be accurate. They have enough weather radars to cover the entire country, satellite images, and wind and rain forecasts going out five days. We couldn’t find anything like that in French Polynesia, which probably was the place with the least available weather forecasts, although they did broadcast periodic weather reports in French.

We could probably deal with the rain, but a 30 knot gusting wind, coming from the north, would make it difficult to get out of the slip, turned in the right direction, and then get backed into the travel lift. A little too much close-quarter maneuvering. The tidal current already surprised us the day we went into the slip, so that would be an added factor. Although, as luck would have it, when we checked the tide predictions it turned out that we just happened to have been scheduled for slack tide.

Just the haulout itself, even under perfect conditions, would have its concerns. They gave us little “S” stickers to put on the hull to show the lift operator where to put the straps. In past haulouts (we’ve done all previous haulouts with this boat in Port Townsend) the boatyard has determined where to place the straps prior to actually picking it up. I wasn’t real comfortable with them placing the responsibility onto us. I mean, what do we know about operating a travel lift? But if something went wrong they could say they were just following our instructions.

The boat Sky Blue Eyes was hauled several days before us. I asked them what they thought about the stickers, and they said that their boat, a Hunter, came from the factory with strap placement arrows already painted on the hull. Okay then. We brought along a photo showing Mysticeti in the lift at Port Townsend. The problem is, the lift there had three straps, all tied together with a horizontal strap low down on each side. They also hauled us once with just two straps, but our picture of that was not from a good angle to show strap placement. Also, at that time we had no masts, rigging or bowsprit, and we were turned around in the opposite direction in the lift. Not really a good comparison.

The forward strap has to go where the hull slopes upward to the bow, and that is the problem. The strap can slip up that slope, letting the boat drop down. The lift here only has two straps. More weight would be on that angled strap. It was suggested by the yard manager that we put the forward strap back far enough that it would still be on the flat part at the bottom of the keel. But that would put both straps in the rear half of the boat. We thought the forward strap would have to be on the slope, and tied strongly to the other strap.

The day of the haulout was still gusting with heavy rain. It looked like the wind direction had changed slightly to the worst possible angle to make it as difficult as possible to get the bow to swing around, against the wind, in order to go forward out of the marina. As a worst case backup plan, the marina has a large inflatable that can be used as a tugboat to help nudge the bow in the right direction. But the woman who operates it would have to come out from the marina office into the rain and wind. We didn’t really want to ask her to do that.

An hour before our scheduled time, the rain had stopped. The wind died down to fifteen knots. It was slack tide. After all that worry and stress, we backed out of the slip and turned the bow to point in the right direction without a hint of difficulty. We went out and looped about a bit, killing time. We moved fenders and dock lines to the other side of the boat in anticipation of tying to a waiting pier near the haulout slip, but then didn’t need to do that anyway.

As we arrived at the haulout, the lift operators were ready and were lowering the straps into the water. I could see there was no horizontal strap. We swung the boat around and managed to get the stern just inside the pilings, which are completely protected by tall, floating tubular roller fenders that provide pivot points to rub against. Now we wanted the wind to catch the bow and bring it around a little, but, just as predicted by MetService, the wind completely died at that moment. But it didn’t matter, we were in far enough that the lift guys could grab the boat with their boat hooks and pull us into place.

We told the lift operator that the straps needed to be tied together. “No worries, Mate.” Except that we had to tie them ourselves, using our own dock lines, much higher up than we wanted which gave the forward strap a lot more freedom to slip. Not exactly like they do things in Port Townsend, but in the end it all worked out okay. They pressure washed the hull and blocked up the boat while we went for lunch—with beer.

Now if the rain, which has started up again, would just quit so we could paint, we could get this whole thing over with and take off in the car to see New Zealand.