Thursday November 23, 2000 Opua, NZ
When Paula came on watch at 2200, Vlad had sighted the light at the tip of North Cape and the loom of the coast was visible against a very dark sky. We have almost lost the moon now – it is the last quarter and it does not rise until nearly dawn. The night was very cloudy with intermittent drizzle until early morning when a clearing sky could be seen to the south. By dawn we could see Cape Wiweki and Cape Brett. Between those two capes lies the Bay of Islands. Morning sea temperature today was 16.3C, down another degree and about what we had south of Brooks Peninsula! (When, as Vlad points out, we thought it was warm, being a major improvement over the 13C we had been experiencing up to then.)
It was a lumpy landfall, at least for the last six hours or so. The wind shifted into the south at about 12 knots and the seas were short and choppy causing the boat to behave at her worst – falling flat down between the waves with a tooth jolting crash. It did not last too long however and as we entered Bay of Islands the waves dropped and we were able to tidy the boat up and take showers. We had been very worried about shipping for the last couple of nights as we were nearing NZ, but in fact the only freighter of the entire trip appeared at about 0645, coming up from Auckland, about 15 miles off the land. There are more sailboats around than freighters. We know that AMALTHEA, CORMORANT, GRAY HAWK and ADRIATICA are all around somewhere. (GRAY HAWK arrived in Opua very early in the morning and later said that they had seen a steady procession of freighters the previous evening and night, so we were just lucky.)
All in all, we cannot complain at all about this passage. It was certainly a lot easier than all our worrying would have suggested (but the worrying made us wait for better weather). We motored quite a bit the last half, but the sailing was great on the way to South Minerva and for the first few days after we left there. Seas were generally calm, with long swells and that made sleeping easy. The worst sleeping was with the motor running! Our double high in the Tasman Sea kept the good weather with us, and we lucked out at the end when yet a third high in the Tasman pushed a threatening Low north, where it dissipated, making for much less boisterous conditions than we had initially expected for the last couple of days. Lots of boats had much worse trips.
We arrived in Opua at 1230 in the afternoon. The sky was bright and sunny, the temparature warm, the views of the islands in the Bay of Islands superb. The Customs officials asked us to pick up a mooring, have lunch and wait our turn. Once AMALTHEA finished with the officials it was our turn. Allan the Customs officer and Jamie the Agricultural official were very cordial and efficient. While Vlad and Allan did the Customs and Immigration formalities in the cockpit, Paula and Jamie went thru our food stores for quarantine purposes. We had to get rid of our scraps of vegetables, garlic, coconut, general garbage and popping corn. All our canned goods and even flour, rice and oatmeal were fine which surprised us. They would have taken any fresh meat (even stuff like spaghetti sauce made from fresh meat) if we'd had any but we had eaten everything! We were done in less than an hour!
We were the 238th boat toarrive in Opua this year. 135 had arrived in November alone. The has been a steady stream of boats arriving after us. Foreign boats also arrive in Whangerei and Auckland.
We decided to stay in the marina for several days to clean TETHYS and reprovision with fresh foods and beer. The Opua Cruising Club hosted a Thanksgiving feast for more than 100 cruisers of all nationalities, complete with turkey, stuffing, lots of mashed potatoes and gravy and assorted salads . This was a great welcome to New Zealand.
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