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Page 2
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Nothing
goes quite as planned on a boat, and High Drama is no exception.
After undergoing a 5-month re-fit that included new paint and rigging,
items that we forgot about or that showed up on our shake down cruise
to Great Barrier Island off Auckland required attention. And then
there was the onset of New Zealand winter. The weather near Auckland
got cool for two Arizonans. Comparable to San Francisco, the temperatures
dropped to the high 40s and 50s and the rains came, and came, frequently
with winds too high for sailing. Most cruisers had long since departed
by June 18, our 36th wedding anniversary when we finally
got away from Gulf Harbour.
Sentinel cormorants
executed a smart about face and saluted as we left.
A
Stop in Whangarei
Although
we set out for Opua in Northern New Zealand before sailing for Fiji,
the weather was lousy with no good forecast until the weekend. Moreover,
we developed a hydraulic fluid leak in the steering wheel that was
quite discouraging. The steering pump was about the only part that
we didn't have rebuilt during the re-fit!
We turned into Whangarei, a port of entry halfway to Opua but 12
miles up a river. Of course, we knew that our friends since Panama,
Peter & Gina on Talisman, Bob and Robin on Misty
Dawn, Alvah and Diana on Roger Henry, and
Mark and Dorothy aboard Dirty Dottie were all in the
marina here, and that helped the decision! We hosted a potluck dinner
with all of those folks. We even got some wine stains on the new
cushions to break them in properly. We noticed that Mike and Stacy
were the only 2001 Pacific voyagers in our small cadre not present
so at 3:00 am their time we called them collect!
The next morning a young hydraulic mechanic fixed the hydraulic
leak and because he read the manual about the steering system, he
solved some steering mysteries we have experienced since our first
cruise to the Channel Islands in 1999. A full-blown storm blowing
driving rain with gusts up to 60 knots kept us hunkered down in
Whangarei for a few more potlucks.
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