Big Ol' Jet Airliner

Hello to all,

"Big ol' jet airliner.." it will soon be carrying us back home, with a little non-rev luck, come tomorrow night. Leave NZL the 9th, get home the 9th. We get our day back. I hope to sleep all the way to LAX. Something about hearing a big ol' high-bypass fan jet engine growling on start up always has made me sleepy. As my fellow crew members will attest. As of yesterday there were still 138 seats available on NZ FLT 2 so we should get on. Horizon 2304 up to ACV only has 6 left so wish us luck.

Today we're comfortably holed up in the boat on the hard stand at Half Moon Bay Marina, Auckland. The marina is a very friendly and efficient place with a little shopping center, a few restaurants, the usual boating service industry and a nice yacht club nearby. We'll hit the club for dinner in a couple hours. It's been rainy and blowing like stink in the 'northland' (the Kiwi name for this region of NZL ) the past few days but today is sunny and just a little windy, a definite improvement. For us tropically acclimated types it's been down right cold and todays' sun feels really good. Getting back to Humboldt County in the fall is going to take some getting used to.

To catch up, we spent about a week in Opua exploring around and doing boat jobs. Richard and Charles Wallis joined us for the sail down the coast. Richard is the Kiwi-now-American son of Charles and Ann who have a beautiful home on Waiheke Island in the Hauraki Gulf near Auckland. He's a pilot for UAL and his wife, Nathalie, is a flight attendant for UAL. They've been our good friends for many years and their parents have been kind enough to put up with us on previous visits. We took three days to day sail down the coast in nice conditions. Kind of like a protracted San Francisco Bay sail in 15-25 knts from beam to close reaching. We had lovely anchorages in Smugglers Bay near Whangeria, Kawa Island and then Onetangi Bay just below Charles and Ann's home.

We spent several days with the Wallis family. Janet got to drool over William, Richard and Nathalie's sweet baby boy. And then we moved the boat into Viaduct Harbor right in the heart of Auckland. The marina is in the middle of the America's Cup village and, for a yachtie, it's a rather special place. For anyone else it's just a very cool area with lots of good restaurants and watering holes. We got a room for a night at the Hilton on Princess Wharf as a little present to ourselves and to watch election returns. The big excitement? Bathtub! Long, deep, granite tiled and unlimited hot water! We hadn't had a bath since before we left back April 5th. What luxury.

Three days in Auckland. It's a decent city and the water front area is very nice and very sailing oriented. However, three days in just about any city is enough for me and Janet is almost as anti-social. So we weren't sad to head over to Half Moon Bay which is a few miles east of the metropolis. The boat will be stored out of the water here until we come back, probably in March, and get ready to head back out again.

So the trip here is completed. Hmmmm...how do it feel? It feels good, definitely, but why? Good question grasshopper but I'm not sure I have the answer yet. There's the obvious, we put 8283 nautical miles under the boat since departure and survived without major damage to the boat or ourselves or 'us'. There is some satisfaction in that and I have the feeling it may be one of those experiences which takes awhile to sink in, that it has to age in the barrel a few months at least. We visited some wonderful places which really can't be done very well any other way than from a boat. We met some sweet people in those wonderful places and had some cultural experiences we will not forget. Perhaps more than any one other thing we enjoyed the camaraderie with our fellow voyagers. There are great folks out doing this thing and to be with them is a privilege. It's a band of brothers (and sisters) type thing and if you're out here you're a part of the brotherhood until proven otherwise...and it's a very broad minded community.

So, I'm told I need to provide some specific examples.

Wonderful places. I'll say Toau, just as an example. A classic South Pacific atoll. We had miles of beaches to ourselves in the south and a wonderful time with Valentine and Gaston up at the northern inlet.

Wonderful people. Valentine and Gaston at Toau. Faaki, the woman who proudly showed us around her village of Matamaka in the Vava'u group, Tonga. Irony...her husband had to learn to be a fisherman after the company he worked for as an aircraft fueler, Royal Tonga Airlines, went broke a few years ago. Some things are the same everywhere. Lisa, Ben and Jason at the Aquarium Cafe in Neiafu, expatriate Americans working very hard, having big fun. Lawrence at the Bounty Bar, the quintessential English gentlemen.

Cultural experiences. The singing at church in Rarotonga. The finest religious singing I have ever heard, rhythmic, complex and deeply moving. Even the stern, tough old minister of the church was blinking away his tears standing at the pulpit while that congregation sang. Seemed he hadn't quite hardened to it after fifty years. The Heiva festival in Huahine, wonderful dancing and a glimpse of Polynesia for Polynesians. The Polynesian drum bands, especially during the competitions in Bora Bora. A Caribbean steel drum band can't compare.

And the camaraderie. Good times with Sergio and Dominique, French. Good times with Dennis and Janet, English. Good times with John, Nancy, Matti, Sophie, Wayne, Alan, Kristen and many more Americans. Good times with Belgians, Germans, Canadians, Swedes, Norwegians, Spanish, (even Danes), Australians, South Africans, Italians and Kiwis. There are probably more Americans in the Pacific than any other breed. And probably more Californians than any other state. I have a feeling things will thin out west of Fiji but here it's still a very 'west coast' kind of place.

The theory that life is a journey has probably been around since mankind started thinking much beyond the next meal. If nothing else this trip was a powerful reinforcement of that idea. The destination doesn't really matter very much. The journey and how you 'travel' is the important thing.

Love to all,
Bill & Janet

Arrival in Opua

Hello to all,

We're in Opua, New Zealand at their lovely marina and effective email contact has been established, I think. And not without effort. But we have some sort of lift off now. My apologies for the lack of communications lately but things have been pretty basic.

We had a good voyage on a passage which inspires a certain dread in the cruising community. There have been enough horror stories generated from the Tonga to NZL trips over the years that everybody takes it pretty seriously. Nothing wrong with that but several hundred boats a year successfully complete the journey. It can be done.

We left Nuku'alofa, Tonga on the morning of the 10th. It was a lovely day with little wind and we motored as planned until late afternoon when the wind began to fill. By the next morning we had 20-25 knots on the nose and had fallen off to the SW making good time in rough conditions. Since we were going to pass close to Minerva Reef we decided to go in there for a quiet evening. That worked out well and we had a nice anchorage in the middle of the Pacific without another boat anywhere around. We had a NZL navy P-3 fly over who confirmed both north and south Minerva reefs were empty except for ourselves. We left Minerva on the 13th and continued to swing a little west before heading almost due south for NZL. Conditions moderated and we had several days of good sailing but it was getting progressively cooler. Say goodbye to the tropics. About 36 hours out we got a big header and it was either motor directly into 20-25 knts and seas or beat into it sailing. Since we ARE a sailboat we just did the sailing and made as good a VMG as we would have motoring. Again conditions moderated and we ended up motoring in glassy calm conditions the last fifty miles into Opua. Quite nice actually, if we had to motor. We made landfall at 1656 local time with 38.6NM left to go to the entrance to the Bay of Oslands where Opua is located. There was an especially lovely sunset with the coast of NZL rising. We were tied to the quarantine dock in Opua at 0105 local time. So Nuku'alofa to Opua took 9 days 16hrs 10 minutes. We stopped in Minerva reef for 17hrs 45 minutes. Total time enroute was 8days 22hrs 25minutes. Distance sailed (or motored) was 1355 NM for a straight line course of 1032 NM. Average speed was 6.3 knots for an average daily distance of 151 NM. So that completes the majority of this years sail. We'll leave here in a few days and take our time day sailing down the coast to Auckland and we may have NZL friends on board for that. Then we'll put the boat on the hard at Half Moon Bay Marina in Auckland and the plan is to fly home on the 9th of November.

I got a ride as crew on a Titan 7.7 last night for the Wednesday evening beer can races. The boat looks just like a Melges 24 on steroids and is the faster thing I've ever sailed. There were about forty boats out there for a nice race and we were either second or first depending on how the times corrected out. There was one big skiff with racks and five guys on trapeze who finished ahead of us but that sail was the fastest I've ever gone in a sailboat. These guys are local pros, a rigger , a sailmaker, etc. They let me trim the main down wind and be rail meat upwind and it was very educational, and great fun!

I'm just not ready to summarize this trip. Too many thoughts about too many things. It's been a great experience. We've learned a lot but I think the more I see out here the more I understand there's much more to know and never enough time to learn it all.



Love to all,
Bill & Janet

Heading South from Vava'u

Hello to all,

We left the Vava'u group of Tonga on Sep. 30th. We had a great time there despite some very 'unsettled' weather during much of our stay. "Unsettled" is the term the South Pacific weather people like to use to describe rain, more rain and blowing like stink. The night before we left Neiafu there were gusts over 60 knots and we had continuous winds over thirty knots for nearly 20 minutes. This was in a very well protected anchorage. Of course by the time we left the group it was dead calm and we motored all the way down to Ha'ano in the Haapai Group. At least it was a beautiful day. And we caught the biggest fish of the trip so far. It was a 62" Yellow Fin tuna and it was quite the fight. Luckily it was calm enough to maneuver the boat while the fish fight went on and we tried to board the beast. When we finally got him gaffed he was too heavy to lift over the life lines so we tied a rolling hitch to the gaff with a spinnaker halyard and used a halyard winch to hoist him up and over. He was probably over a hundred pounds. There will be pictures to follow when we get internet access again. We've been giving away fish to everyone. We'll never eat it all even though it's absolutely delicious.

As far as we know there's one computer in the Haapai group and it's dirt slow on the net. This letter is coming via HF/sailmail. However, the Haapai group islands are very beautiful. It's a combination of the low lying palm tree lined beaches of the Tuamotuos and the slightly more raised and rugged Vava'u group. The villages and the one real town, named Pangai, are very quiet and rural but a little better organized and seemingly more prosperous than the out villages in Vava'u. Things here are very basic. There are several churches, a couple small groceries and one 'cafe' with that computer I mentioned. There are a few very remote and quiet resorts which tend to be very nice but the kind of place where the customers think they're the only people in the world who know about it and everyone wants to keep it that way. We have the place pretty much to ourselves but there are two other boats now in Pangai, the capitol, of Haapai. We initially anchored in Ha'ano and spent one night there but again it began blowing really hard and backing around to put us on a lee shore. So we pulled anchor (really fun in those conditions) and headed south to Foa where there was better protection. We spent a couple days there and then moved here to Pangai this morning. We're here with 'Free Spirit' and 'Be Be' and they are very good company. The anchorage is excellent and although there are plenty of reefs surrounding us I described this to Janet after I dove the anchor as the "perfect set". And what is the perfect set? We're in 18 feet of clear water above smooth white sand. The wind is holding us offshore and the shore reef is 200 yards to windward. The offshore reef is a good quarter mile to leeward. The 3/8" anchor chain lies for a hundred feet straight ahead without a lump of coral in sight and the 55 pound Rocna is half buried in nice sand. It don't get much better than this. Now if the wind would calm down (still blowing 20-25 knots)we could really enjoy this sunny afternoon.

The plan from here is to head for New Zealand. We'll wait for a weather window and depart from wherever we happen to be when it looks good for the 1100 mile voyage. We contract with Bob McDavitt of the New Zealand meteorological service for weather forecasting. In his latest mini update he thought it might look good for a departure on the 8th. We'll see. We can get fairly good weather info off HF radio but I feel better on a long trip having the local weather expert, and that's very much what Bob is, telling me what I'm seeing and analyzing is or is not what I think.


Love to all,
Bill & Janet
SV Airstream

Good Times In Vava'u

Hello to all,

It's been a very social time here in Vava'u the past couple weeks. Just about everyone we've met along the coconut milk run has congregated in Tonga although a few boats chose to go to Fiji and a few boats have left for Haapai. We've been racing on Fridays and doing well although we can't seem to actually win outright. There is always some big boat or two which is just too darn fast to beat boat for boat. We console ourselves that if this was 'real' racing with any kind of handicap system we'd be well ahead of the game. Of course, what would happen with the boats who are slower and have correspondingly greater handicap ratings than us? Best not to think about it. We've had only one casualty. Glen from "Tin Soldier" who crews for us trimming the traveler got whacked by the mainsheet when the boom came over in a jibe. Luckily there are a couple doctors in the fleet. A few stitches here and there and he was racing again with us next week. And watching the main sheet very carefully!

We've spent more time in the 'big city' of Neiafu than we planned. We were waiting for our new windlass to be delivered. This is not such a simple matter since it came by air from New Zealand to Tongatapu and then by the weekly ferry from Tongatapu to Neiafu. This has been known to take awhile. For us it worked just fine and after a little discussion with the customs officials, very gentlemanly and sweet, and the exchange of some cash in the form of a 'use tax' we had our new windlass. A few hours of wiring, hammering and bolting and, low and behold, it works as advertised! I feel now my fingers and feet have a much better chance of survival than had we tried to continue with the previous old beast.

The weather has been a bit of a disappointment. Just too much rain and overcast. We could have been in the Pacific northwest if it were about ten degrees cooler. That system does now seem to have finally broken down and we've had some sun and we're looking forward to more.

We went whale watching and swimming with Humpback whales a few days ago. It was a really rough day so they were on the move and we only got in the water a few minutes with a cow and a calf. Still very impressive to be snorkeling along with a forty foot beast and her ten foot calf. Day after tomorrow we plan to head south to the Haapai group and spend at least a few days there. Then we go a little further south to Tongatapu and the capitol of Tonga, Nuku'Alofa. From there we shove off for New Zealand. So this is the beginning of the third phase of the season for us. We did the passage to Polynesia, we have crossed much of Polynesia and now we leave Polynesia for New Zealand. There are certainly mixed feelings about this. We have already said goodbye to some good friends who we may not see anymore. There's the feeling that we won't be coming this way again and that we haven't done all we should have done. There's the thought that we're letting 'time' and 'insurance criteria' (the insurance companies require boats to be out of the tropics during the typhoon season) run our lives. But there's also the desire to move on. And desire to meet friends in New Zealand. And, the truth be told, the desire to actually come back to our home for a while and see family and friends and cats.

Love to all,
Bill & Janet