December 5, 2004
35°S 173°45'E
Whangaroa, New Zealand
Hello everybody! We’re in Whangaroa harbour, near the top of the North Island of New Zealand, waiting for a good weather window to run down the west coast to Nelson at the top of the South Island. We hope to be down there before Christmas and then to spend most of the summer exploring the South Island. It’s one of the interesting things about New Zealand that somewhere between 600 and 1,000 foreign boats clear into the country every year, and of those only a handful ever ventures south of Auckland. The cruising boats all cluster in the top quarter of the country, and most of their owners spend the cyclone season recovering from the Pacific crossing and doing boat work rather than touring New Zealand. Until now, that has included us - this is our second visit and we have spent a total of more than a year in this country and never been south of Auckland. Now we’re on our way, to the glaciers, fjords, mountains, and wilderness of the South Island.
We left Auckland three weeks ago for the last time and sailed north to the Bay of Islands, which is where we made landfall after our passage from Tasmania last March. The annual exodus from the tropics to New Zealand is in full swing, with hundreds of boats arriving in the last few weeks to get clear of the South Pacific cyclone season which begins in earnest this month. At this time of the year, this area becomes a locus of cruising activity, with boats converging on it from all parts of the Pacific. We’ve spent the last few weeks socializing with friends last seen several years ago in Chile or Iceland or Ireland or the Caribbean. Each of them has chosen a different route to get here and has a different story to tell.
When we were just south of the Bay of Islands, we heard a familiar voice on the radio and called MAHINA TIARE. John Neal and Amanda Swan-Neal run adventure/sail training expeditions in their 46-foot Halberg-Rassey. We last saw them in Kinsale, Ireland in September of 2000, the season before they went up to Spitzbergen, an island north of Norway and above the Arctic Circle. They returned to the Pacific through the Panama Canal a few years ago. This year, they did a loop from New Zealand through the South Pacific and back again. They had arrived from Fiji a few days before and came into the harbor where we were with a group of six enthusiastic charterers aboard. We got to spend a pleasant day with them including a family style dinner aboard MAHINA TIARE before they headed south toward Auckland.
We last saw our British friends Ann and Graham Evans on their 40-foot cat ketch, FYNE SPIRIT, in Reykjavik, Iceland in July of 2001. Since then, they sailed down the length of the Atlantic to the Straits of Magellan and then north up the Chilean channels. We missed them by only a month or so when we were on our way south for our second run through the channels. They spent six months hiking around Argentina and working in England before they left Puerto Montt for the Pacific in May of this year. They are both medical professionals and will spend a few years working here before they decide what’s next in their sailing lives.
Our friends Pablo and Aude had the smallest boat when we were in the Chilean channels. We last saw them and their 24-foot aluminum cutter, MILONGA, in Puerto Montt, Chile in October 2002 when we headed south down the Chilean channels. They headed north and east for the Pacific Islands sometime after that. They are both French and PhDs in biochemistry, and they spent much of the last year teaching biology to high school students in Tahiti. They were living on beautiful Moorea island and commuting on a ferry to Tahiti to teach for three days a week. They got paid extra for this “hardship” duty, and they didn’t have to pay any taxes at all. Not a bad deal! But you do have to be French…
The harbor where we are now is a huge inlet entered through a narrow channel between two rocky headlands. Inside, steep cliffs reminiscent of Bora-Bora rise in vertical walls above the trees. More than a dozen anchorages can be found in five large arms radiating off in different directions after you come through the entrance. These vary from rugged and mountainous to low and pastoral. A small town lies at the southernmost end of the harbor at the base of a large hill capped by a rounded rock several hundred feet high and sheer on three sides. Compared to the low islets and sandy beaches to be found in the rest of the Bay of Islands, this harbor feels completely out of place, as if someone had mistakenly fitted a puzzle piece into the north of New Zealand that really belonged in Norway or Scotland.
Unexpected surprises found around a headland - whether breathtaking vistas or old friends last seen many miles ago - keep us moving on to the next place and the next adventure. We look forward to seeing many of you in the year to come as we make our way across the Pacific and back to North America. We hope that this message finds you enjoying family and friends as the holiday season approaches, celebrating light, life, and love, and full of thanksgiving for the blessings of the year just past and exciting plans for the year to come.
With all the season’s joy,
Beth and Evans
s/v HAWK
September 3, 2004
36°37'S 174°48'E
Gulf Harbour, Whangaparoa, New Zealand
Hello everybody!
After three months held captive by a spiderweb of lines and immobilized by a lack of sails, HAWK’s back in sailing shape. We’ve been off the dock twice in the last ten days, and plan to head out tomorrow for six weeks of cruising around the Hauraki Gulf. By Northern hemisphere standards we’re just coming into March, but one of New Zealand’s coldest winters seems to have broken, and we’re eager to get out on the water and enjoy the spring.
We’ve spent the winter as we have spent the last three winters, with Evans engaged in boat projects and both of us writing. Evans did manage to get to the tropics briefly in July when he crewed to Fiji aboard a 103-foot super yacht. They dined gourmet-style every night on such luxuries as ostrich steaks and strawberry ice cream, and he had his own stateroom with a double berth and a private bathroom. They sailed the 1,200 miles in four and a half days – almost twice as fast as we could have done it aboard HAWK. Though he enjoyed the experience, he was glad to get back to HAWK where if a line parts or a piece of equipment fails no one’s likely to get seriously injured. Evans has also written quite a few articles again this winter, and he has just been commissioned to do a one-year column with a British magazine, Yachting Monthly, on safety at sea.
My time has been devoted to the revision of The Voyager’s Handbook, which has turned into much more of a project than I had originally envisioned or intended. Only when I started writing did I realize how much has changed since we left aboard SILK twelve years ago. So many of the topics I need to cover didn’t even exist back then – high tech materials for lines and sails, the Internet and satellite communications, onboard weather forecasting tools, and watermakers and generators and other conveniences that make life aboard almost like life ashore. I start each chapter thinking it will be just a revision of the material and end up re-writing it completely. But I am making headway, and with any luck the revised book will be on the market by Christmas 2005.
HAWK’s got newly anodized portlights and a touched up paint job, as well as two brand new sails. We probably wouldn’t have gotten her back together so early this season except that we had a friend from Australia come visit last week to sail her. We first met Steph and her husband, Chris, last winter in Fremantle, Australia. They had just returned from a year’s sailing adventure aboard a Vancouver 27. Steph was very pregnant, but in spite of that they were wandering the docks and talking about building an aluminum boat and leaving again in five years’ time. We never did get out sailing with them in Freo – just as we got HAWK re-commissioned in the spring, Steph delivered their twelve-pound, six-ounce baby by Caesarian. The delivery took a lot out of her, and she had not recovered when we left for Tasmania. We’ve continued to correspond, and when Steph worried about double-handing a boat HAWK’s size in an e-mail, we suggested they come spend some time aboard. Chris couldn’t get away from work, so Steph committed to six hours of flying time each way alone with Silas, who had just turned one year old.
Having a baby around was a new experience for both of us, but it worked out very well. We got out sailing the day after Steph arrived, and turned the cockpit into a giant playpen for Silas. Though it was blowing 20 knots with gusts to 25, Silas had a wonderful time, cooing with pleasure at the water racing by HAWK’s side and laughing up at us from among the makeshift toys littered around the cockpit. He didn’t mind a stranger taking charge of him, or the fact that his mother routinely disappeared to try out the sail handling for herself. The last evening they spent with us, Evans converted HAWK’s main saloon into an amusement park complete with bright orange ball fenders dangling on long lines from the handgrips and his bosun’s chair as a makeshift swing. But when I asked him if he wanted one, he said, “Are you kidding? What a lot of work!” Though I enjoyed Silas tremendously, I’m at an age where I have to agree.
This has been a tough winter for New Zealand with flooding and earthquakes in the Bay of Plenty south of Auckland and severe winter storms throughout the South Island. The small city of Dunedin toward the southern end of the South Island was cut off twice this winter by snowstorms, and there were several serious avalanches in nearby ski areas. Yet this was the warmest, driest winter we have had since the Caribbean in 1999/2000. We’re hoping the summer weather will be more cooperative. We plan to head down to the South Island in December and spend several months there before beginning the 8,000-mile run catty-corner across the Pacific Ocean to Vancouver.
Hope this finds everyone well,
Beth and Evans
s/v HAWK
May 21, 2004
36°37'S 174°48'E
Gulf Harbour, Whangaparoa, New Zealand
Hello everybody!
We’ve reached our winter berth and are settling in for a few months. We will be staying in Gulf Harbour Marina about 40 miles north of Auckland, where Evans plans to do lots of boat work and Beth plans to do lots of writing.
New Zealand is the first place where we’ve encountered the mainstream of the offshore sailing fleet since leaving the Caribbean in 2000 – an estimated 650 foreign yachts cleared into New Zealand for the Southern summer just ending and 800 the year before. With the winter season approaching and cyclone season ending, all the cruisers here have been feverishly working to get their boats ready to head back to the tropics, and the exodus began in earnest this week when we finally got a stretch of settled southerly winds. We’re the exception, hunkering down for a New Zealand winter instead of sailing north in search of warm weather and coral lagoons. By making landfall on the North Island from Tasmania, we were able to meet up with a number of good friends we last saw several years ago, either in Chile or in the Caribbean, before they left for the tropics. They’ve been sailing west; we’ve been sailing east – and here we meet.
New Zealand has also become the adopted country of a number of other yachting friends, and we were able to visit with some of them as we worked our way south toward Auckland. We met up with Diana Simon in Whangarei where she and Alvah have bought a cute cottage set in rolling hills within sight of the sea. Alvah wrote NORTH TO THE NIGHT about their experiences wintering over in the Arctic aboard their steel sloop, and we became friends when he and Diana were living in Maine. Alvah was delivering a boat from Australia when we were there, but we had a lovely evening with Diana and Halifax, their stately tortoiseshell cat who helped keep Alvah alive through that long, dark, cold winter. She has been enjoying a life of ease in her country retirement, though the white tips on her black ears – the result of frostbite – hint at her adventurous early days.
We also spent some time with Lin and Larry Pardey, well-known sailing icons who have been writing and cruising for almost four decades aboard engineless, wooden boats. We dropped in on Mickey Mouse Marine (“a division of 3M”) as they call their small boatyard on Kawau Island about two hours north of Auckland. Kawau has no roads, only logging trails, and the houses are all accessed from the sea via water taxis or private motorboats. Lin and Larry have taken a derelict “batch” – the Kiwi term for a small cottage without electricity or running water – and when they weren’t out cruising over the last few decades, turned it into a livable, open plan beach house with more improvements yet to come. Kawau’s seventy or so permanent residents have watched their island become a Mecca for the high-flyers from Auckland, and in the summer the population swells to several thousand.
New Zealand has enjoyed a tremendous period of prosperity and growth since we were here last, driven in part by the booming world economy but mostly by the America’s Cup and the advent of a world class film industry that has brought you “Lord of the Rings,” “Whale Rider,” and “The Last Samurai” among others. The population has grown from three million to four and become much more diverse in the last decade with immigrants from the South Pacific islands and Asian countries. Auckland has gone from a sleepy small town surrounded by apple orchards and sheep farms to a bustling small city surrounded by upscale suburbs.
But perhaps the most striking change is in the way New Zealand treats its indigenous population. When we were here last, a huge gap existed between the white and Maori populations with respect to education, infant mortality, longevity, and just about every other measure of health or social welfare. Today, though, the Maori have become a political force to be reckoned with, proud of their culture and heritage and willing to fight for what they perceive to be their rights.
The gap has closed on wages, mortality, and health statistics. There are a number of Maori MPs in the parliament, and they have enough clout to cast the deciding ballots in any confidence vote against the government. Such large changes could not come about without there being winners and losers, without some on each side wanting to go back to the past. But New Zealand seems on the road to achieving what Australia has not yet managed – what no other Western country has managed – they have begun to integrate their aboriginal population into the very fabric of the country’s daily life and to raise them to the economic level of the white Europeans. The road may be long and bumpy, but they’re fully embarked upon it. In light of all the mistakes in Iraq, we very much admire what they have managed to accomplish.
Stay safe and stay in touch,
Beth and Evans
s/v HAWK
March 28, 2004
35°18'S 174°07'E
Opua, New Zealand
Hello everybody!
We have left the land of Oz and are now in EnZed, aka Land of the Long White Cloud. Our Tasman crossing wasn’t in the least what we had expected. The Tasman has a nasty reputation in large part because three separate weather patterns feed into the sea separating Tasmania from New Zealand, which means there’s almost always a low or a crush zone lurking somewhere. Beside the low pressure systems in the fifties and sixties and their frontal systems sweeping through further north, lows often form just off the southeast coast of Australia and come zooming down into the Tasman with little or no warning, and the remains of cyclones wander in from the Coral Sea. Friends of ours on a Waterline 48 who left from the Australian mainland a few weeks before us got hit by a meteorological “bomb” and had 70 knots of wind for several hours with gusts well over 80. We saw the videotape of their crossing two nights before we left Hobart – not very entertaining when we were about to embark on the same trip.
But for our ten-day crossing, we had nothing but high pressure from the Australian bight to New Zealand. Instead of several frontal systems and at least one low pressure system, as we had expected, we had light easterly winds forward of the beam for almost the entire passage with the exception of one fifteen knot front. We reefed sails twice and put up the reacher once. Other than tacking every day or so, that was the sum total of our sailhandling. It may well be the first time we have finished a passage more rested than when we started.
HAWK sailed extremely well, and we averaged 6 knots for the ten-day passage though we rarely had more than 8 knots of true wind. We motored more than we would have liked, but managed to sail about two-thirds of the time sometimes in winds as light as 2-3 knots. The night before we made landfall on Cape Reinga at the north of New Zealand’s north island, the sea was so calm the stars were perfectly reflected in it. It was impossible to tell where the sea ended and the sky began and it felt as if we were suspended inside a star-filled sphere.
New Zealand has changed a great deal in the decade since we were here last. We remembered the Bay of Islands as a sleepy and largely undeveloped area, and compared it to Maine in the 1960s or Long Island Sound in the 1950s. Last Sunday evening as we approached the channel leading to Opua on the west coast of the North Island, we were one of about fifty sail and power boats heading for the marinas and anchorages around Russell and Opua. Dolphin tour boats circled around a pod of bottlenose dolphin swimming in the middle of the channel; powerboats filled with thrill-seeking tourists did donuts at speed, the people inside screaming and cheering. But the area remains breathtakingly beautiful, with upthrust islands and pillars of rocks dotting the bay, and wooded hills surrounding it.
We have spent the last week in a large marina here in Opua that didn’t exist when we were here last. We’ve re-provisioned, filled water, fuel and propane tanks, and plan to head out and explore this area for the next six weeks or so. When we were here last, we spent almost all of our time in Auckland working on SILK, and only spent a couple of weeks up here before clearing out for New Caledonia. So we’re looking forward to really exploring this area and seeing some of the places we passed by last time around. We’ll head down to Auckland in the middle of May to get some sail work done and to spend some time in that area. Internet access seems to be easy throughout New Zealand, so please feel free to get in touch. We’d love to hear from you!
We hope this finds all of you happy and healthy and wish you the same joy we felt flying over a star-filled sea, awed by the beauty of our precious world.
Fair winds and safe anchorages,
Beth and Evans
s/v HAWK
February 3, 2004
42°53'S 147°30'E
Hobart, Tasmania
Hello everybody!
HAWK and her crew have been floating around the southeast corner of Tasmania, enjoying the most relaxing cruising we’ve had since our summer in Scotland in 2000. After the almost non-stop run down the Atlantic, the challenges in Chile and the 9,000-mile Southern Ocean passage, we were all ready to move a little more slowly. It is such a pleasure to raise the anchor and go out for a few hours, work hard to keep Hawk gliding along in less than three knots of breeze or bounce merrily over the waves in twenty-five knots, and decide after an hour or two where we want to set the hook for the night. Though this cruising ground is considerably smaller than Scotland, we’re still discovering new anchorages and finding new places to explore ashore.
One place where we spent quite a bit of time was Port Arthur, a historical settlement on the southern end of the Tasman peninsula, the butterfly like projection connected by a tiny spit of land to the southeast corner of the island. To reach Port Arthur, we sailed around Cape Raoul within sight of Cape Pillar and Tasman Island. All of these formations on the south coast of the Taman peninsula consist of dolorite columns – round, orange, rock columns packed together into headlands and capes rising sheer from the sea to almost 1,000 feet, constantly being eroded by the action of the Southern Ocean – one of the most spectacular stretches of shoreline we have ever seen.
Port Arthur served as one of the convict settlements in Australia, but this one was for repeat offenders, incorrigibles, who after getting transported to Australia or Hobart in Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) offended again and needed another level of punishment. The settlement was created in 1830. The site was selected partially because of the abundance of raw materials but largely because of the defensibility of the narrow neck of land connecting the Tasman Peninsula to the rest of Tasmania. In an era when few people knew how to swim, the settlement could be guarded by a handful of soldiers and dogs stationed at Eaglehawk Neck. Of the more than 12,000 convicts that passed through the settlement, only two ever escaped.
At its height, over 2,000 convicts were in residence, guarded by 250 military personnel. With their families and other civilians, the entire population was close to 5,000. The complex included almost everything necessary for survival, as Hobart was a one- to three-day sail away depending on the weather. They had their own bakery, flour mill, blacksmith, boat building facility, cooper, sawmill, armorer, brick factory, and non-denominational church. The complex consisted of dozens of stately buildings built of local sandstone and yellow bricks made on site.
The settlement closed in 1877, and a period of shame and denial descended on Australia. Many of Port Arthur’s buildings were pulled down or allowed to burn in an effort to eradicate the “convict stain.” By 1884, the name of the area had been changed to Canarvon and a small community had grown up amidst the ruins. By 1927, Australians were starting to re-evaluate their convict history, and the name “Port Arthur” was reinstated. Over the next few decades, the government started to reacquire the land and buildings in the area. By 1970, the government had regained control of almost all the land that had once been part of the settlement. They turned it over to the Parks Service, and in the last few years they have been pouring $2 million per year into restoration. The entire complex covers some 400 acres and includes over thirty buildings. While many buildings like the penitentiary, the barracks and the church consist only of the original stone and brick walls, a number of smaller buildings have been refurbished and furnished to the period. It’s a tremendously impressive monument to Australian history and to the Australian’s willingness to come to terms with that history.
While in Port Arthur, we met up with German Thies Munzen aboard WANDERER III, the 30-foot wooden yacht the Hiscocks sailed around the world on their first circumnavigation. Thies has cruised aboard the boat for 23 years – six years longer than the Hiscocks – the last fifteen of them with his Swedish wife, Kicki. Thies and Kicki spent eight months living aboard her in South Georgia and sailed (not motored!) her up the Chilean channels from south to north, averaging twenty miles a day. WANDERER has now circumnavigated five times and covered more than 200,000 nautical miles. “She’s pelagic,” he told us. “She just wants to keep going around and around the world’s oceans.”
We’ve been slow responding to e-mails because we’ve been a bit out of touch when we’ve been off cruising. We do get back to Hobart and Internet land every few weeks to re-stock the boat and get caught up on the backlog of e-mails. But we still love to hear from you…
Still wanderin’,
Beth and Evans
s/v HAWK