May day has arrived in New Zealand! We awoke this morning to the sound of drumming coming from the Canopy Bridge. Annually, the Whangarei Morris Dancers host a “dancing up the sun” event on May 1st to celebrate the traditional May Day. But May Day in New Zealand is primarily celebrated as International Workers’ Day rather than the more traditional dancing around the May Pole. Many districts hold rallies and speeches to advocate for employment rights and fair pay agreements. Tomorrow there is both a rally planned as well as a Walk for Peace starting near where we are docked in Town Basin. We are hoping the weather stays clear as predicted so we can participate.
With the start of May, the pressure is building to find a safe weather window to leave New Zealand. We finally are taking delivery of our new sail today, so we can really leave at any point now. We are subscribed to a number of forums and what’s app groups with other sailors who are also heading out of New Zealand back to Fiji and Tonga. This week the exodus began. A fair number of boats decided to chance leaving in what looked to us like a non starter for a weather window. The winds were looking high as well as a very confused sea state. Now 3-4 days into their passages, we are seeing updates from the boats that left that indeed the passage has not been good so far. Many have seen sustained winds of 30-35 knots, challenging currents, and swells ranging from “breaking over the boat” to “big” (8 feet or so but big and messy). Hindsight is always 20/20 but some of those early departers are now encouraging others to be patient and wait for a good window so that they have a safer passage than what those boats are experiencing. We are hoping all make it safely to their destination and the weather calms for them very soon. So, while we are anxious to begin our passage, we will definitely wait for a better window to leave! We will likely leave Town Basin this week to head to Marsden Cove Marina which is where we will check out with customs and depart from once we finally have a window. In the last look of the weather, we are not seeing any good windows for at least another week to ten days and even that is iffy. So we will try to be patient and rest up so that we are in good shape for our upcoming passage!
We were very happy to finally receive our new sail today! It was originally supposed to arrive by April 1st. It missed that deadline and then when it did arrive in New Zealand, it got held up in customs for two weeks due to incorrect paperwork and then another week because it got tagged for extra inspections. Finally it was released and delivered today – phew. We got it installed and are anxious to see how it performs once we are back out sailing!
The rest of our week was mainly cooking and freezing meals for our upcoming passage and working on my Project Management certification for me while Bob continued to work on the installation of our new operating system for Meraviglia. This new system should help to unify a lot of our systems through one interface. But it has required a lot of behind the scenes work, multiple trips for additional electronics, and some early morning Zoom calls! But it is progressing fairly well and it will be good to do some testing with it when we move the boat up to Marsden. We also continued to enjoy our lovely location in Town Basin with shopping, restaurants, and a lovely running trail right off of our dock. We will definitely miss New Zealand when we finally get our weather window to depart but will enjoy moving back into warmer temperatures!
