Lat: 35 17.640 S
Lon: 174 27.640 E

Friday morning it looked like our favorable winds were coming in early, so we decided to head out toward Tauranga. We finished up several repairs we’d started earlier, and made some more calls back to family in the US. Since it’s Thanksgiving there, they were gathering together and it was great to hear their voices, especially my cousin Heidi, who’s expecting a baby girl in a week (we’re proud of you guys). Lauren even got to see her Grandma on Skype, which definitely made her a bit homesick. Thanksgiving is usually my favorite holiday, with all the great food and family. Phone calls and Skype aren’t quite the same, but at least we’re in the land of the supermarket, so things on the food front are becoming much more diverse and interesting. We even have brown rice, which was impossible to find for the last several months.

Once we finally finished preparations we weighed anchor and headed out under sail without ever using the engine. That was a first for us and was sort of fun. We had one engine on just in case, but were able to get underway without using it. The boat had a couple signs of not being used for a while; the roller furler was seized up and took a while to free, and a couple of winches are having issues. Lauren serviced all of them before we left, but it’s been a year and they’ve seen a lot of use. Once we finally tacked down the channel and out into the Bay of Islands, the wind started to die on us, so we decided to spend the night anchored at Roberton Island. Roberton Island is where Captain Cook first landed here in the Bay of Islands and is a beautiful spot with two high ends connected by an isthmus with a nice rock and shell beach. After anchoring, we went ashore and climbed the path to a lookout over the bay that was the site of a Maori pa (hilltop fortification) back in Cook’s day. There weren’t any visible remains, but the view was great.

  The dink on the beach at Roberton Island

Pura Vida from the hillside trail

The view from the hilltop

This morning we tried sailing off the anchor again, but there just wasn’t enough wind in the anchorage so we eventually motored to the east tip of the island before sailing behind several small islands and out into the bay. We had lots of wind as we rounded Cape Brett and sailed past Piercy Rock (Cook named the rock, which looks like it has a hole pierced through it, after an Endeavour sailor named Piercy). We’re headed to Tauranga with a planned stop at Great Barrier Island, which is giving us a nice downwind sail. The sun finally came out after an overcast morning, making for ideal sailing, even if it is a little cool.

The famed Piercy Rock, just off of Cape Brett (people actually pay a lot of money to go through the hole on a big cigarette boat)

Virtually every boat we’ve met along our Pacific crossing has showed up in Opua. A couple opted for Australia, but all of the others are here. Just as I was typing this, we heard Dave on the South African Wharram cat Dragon calling customs for arrival check-in. The most interesting arrival we saw was a 70 year-old single hander on a 36-foot boat. He was clearly having trouble putting one foot in front of the other and we learned that he had just arrived after being 44 days offshore from Raiatea direct to Opua. We didn’t get the full story, but it’s no wonder his landlegs were slow in coming. We still aren’t fully adjusted ourselves. We’d rather be at a beautiful, quiet anchorage than tied to a dock in town. Seeing "fashion" again is taking a bit of an adjustment as well. Aside from a few American honeymooners in Bora Bora and some Kiwi tourists in Aitutaki, we haven’t really been around westerners our age for a while. Going into town at night wearing some warm clothes we dug out of our berth and a foul weather jacket to keep warm makes a funny contrast with the fashionably dressed backpackers and tourists. Atoll wardrobes (shorts, t-shirt, and flip-flops with that distinctive Salvation Army flair) don’t seem to be in high demand here.