Finding our boat in New Zealand

Happy New Year everyone! It’s been a while since Laura last blogged and lots has happened. So, after a wonderful Christmas and New Year spent with family and friends in Bembridge and Winchester, we thought it high time to update you as to what’s going on. Before I do, can we just take this opportunity to thank everyone for all their interest, good wishes and Christmas cards. I’m afraid we didn’t manage Christmas cards this year, so please accept this as our heartfelt greeting and best wishes for Christmas and the New Year.

I suppose the biggest blogging news is that we have found a boat. “Victoria” is a 50ft wooden ketch, built in New Zealand and launched in 1988. She has sailed 150,000 miles and has just returned to New Zealand after seven years away sailing the world, including our home waters and rounding the Horn. She is a tried and tested world cruiser, with a unique layout below-decks which feels like it may suit us well, but above all she is solid, well maintained, safe, steady on the wind and should look after us through hell and high water if we encounter them! Just what we were looking for. You may recall that Laura and I met on a boat named Victoria, racing round the world thirteen years ago, so it seems serendipitous or whatever you’d like to call it, that Victoria will be our home once more. Whether we sail her home again or not is a question that will only be answered by the passage of time!

Victoria: 50ft wooden ketch (3 skin Kauri with epoxy glass sheath)

I hope you’ll agree, she’s a great looking boat. You’ll need to zoom in on the layout I expect. Before I describe the journey I made to New Zealand to find Victoria, I’ll bring you briefly up to speed on what we’ve been up to since Laura’s last blog. I finished work on 18^th October, just in time for the children’s half-term break, and we then went on a Scottish road-trip. Love Scotland, we try and go every year if we can. My work people were amazing and excited by our adventure and I was so touched by their interest, generosity and flexibility, and a couple of really good social get-togethers marked the occasion. Wowsers-trousers, I didn’t really expect it. What a wonderful group of people. I’ve written elsewhere about the amazing people we work with; we forge strong bonds, sometimes without realising it!

After half term, the kids went back to school and Laura to work and I spent a week each on Engines (diesel, jet-ski and outboard) and Astro-navigation at the Emsworth School of Navigation. The engines course was a Maritime and Coastguard Agency approved qualification and the Astro-Nav was the RYA Ocean Yachtmaster theory course, which included some good stuff on weather and passage planning. Laura and I also squeezed in two days of sea survival training (ISAF/RYA). All gloom and doom and enough to put anyone off venturing into a boat, let alone taking it offshore! All necessary though and we had fun firing off flares, fire extinguishers, cutting rigging and turning over upside life-rafts in a swimming pool! Not very realistic, but it’s the principles which count!

         This is us messing around in the pool in the Hamble            

After another week of chasing my tail around trying to look at boats on the internet, planning my New Zealand trip, looking at insurance, getting my eyes tested, trying to be useful with the children and so on, and not really feeling like I was getting anywhere, and after Dad’s 90^th birthday dinner, Laura and the kids dropped me off at the bus which took me to Heathrow on 25^th November for the flight to Auckland via Bangkok. Thai airways were very nice, but that is one hell of a long way! 11hrs + 3 hrs stopover + 11hrs. And so much for my business class days, they are long over! I rather wished I hadn’t watched the Donald Crowhurst film “The Mercy”, though Colin Firth and Rachel Weisz are very good in it I thought. I found a very wet Auckland, but a cheery and dry YMCA to dump my stuff and went for a wander before fatigue overtook me. At 11pm I went to sleep and awoke fully refreshed. I was rather pleased with myself, no jetlag! Only then I looked at my phone for the time and it read 1:30am! Oh dear!

After the rest of the sleepless night, I headed North with a broker friend of one of our RCC  (Royal Cruising Club) contacts. The RCC is an extraordinary collection of yachting folk who have cruised in every corner of the planet and we are fortunate enough to have been members since about 2012. When I say “cruised” I mean sailed Greenland and the high latitudes at both ends of the planet, North-West Passage, North and South Pacific, round Cape Horn etc. though less punchy voyages are tolerated! We have been the lucky recipients all kinds of support and advice from the New Zealand members as we plan this adventure, all of whom have done extensive sailing in the South Pacific and in their home waters. And I visited many of them as I reasonably could on this trip and they were without exception hugely hospitable and generous. What most of them don’t know about cruising the South Pacific and boats for that matter, probably isn’t worth knowing. So, it was through the RCC that I discovered Victoria, and was fortunate to meet with the owners at the Royal New Zealand Yacht Squadron (in the presence of the America’s Cup no less!) and to be able to make the arrangements to view and sail her in the Bay of Islands over several days.

Back to my very new broker friend who was kind enough to drive me around for a few days and I think we viewed around 6-7 boats. Russell and the Bay of Islands are all gorgeous. He left me at Opua (Oh - poo – ah!) in the North of the North Island where I viewed more boats and checked out the marina and boatyard facilities, as well as spending some valuable chatting time with cruisers who had recently arrived from the tropics. I stayed a few more nights in the Bay of Islands where I viewed and sailed Victoria and then checked into the former Gaol house in Whangarei. (Fang - ah - ray). It is now a lovely and chilled “backpackers” and I had a jail cell to myself, literally. Complete with iron bars and heavy steel doors, but someone had thought sensitively to remove the locks! 

While in Whangarei, along with another long-term cruising couple, I was entertained by the wonderful Davidson family, Winchester neighbours, who have spent two and a half years sailing from Southampton to Whangarei with their two boys in “Bonaire”, a tidy Garcia 52 and a seriously nice boat! 

The inside of the old Whangarei Gaol house

Over the side job on a ship in Tauranga… Health and Safety guys?

After I visited Tauranga and then Wellington, where I sailed another boat in the wonderful Wellington harbour, I headed back to Auckland, and met with the owners of Victoria to move things forward, which I’m very happy to say we did, before flying home.  Once I’d recovered from the horrendous jet-lag it was into Christmas. Of note we had an old 6-man life raft, which we decided to inflate in the garden to show the children how it works and what’s inside it so that they have an idea. This proved to be a real hit and they spent hours playing in it and making up stories around it. On reflection, it was better than doing it a pool, which was an idea which nearly came to fruition, because they could play in it and really get familiar with everything without anyone having to worry about anyone drowning! So glad we did this!

                  

Sailing in Wellington Harbour

and getting everyone used to a life-raft back home….. 

Looking ahead now with less than two months to go before we all fly to Auckland, there’s plenty to do to prepare. Renting out the house, packing all our possessions up for storage, getting the children’s home schooling sorted, putting Snow Goose to bed, dealing with myriad admin from insurance to money, all the workings of our onshore life. And then there is more upskilling for me; a long-range radio course in January, so I can be competent with HF and satellite comms both to communicate routinely and in an emergency, and importantly to receive weather information offshore. A first aid update in February. And then there is the prep for New Zealand in terms of equipment, planning and accommodation.

The next milestone for Victoria from our point of view is a pre-purchase survey in mid-January. All being well, the plan is to join her in Auckland in early March to finish a repaint and participate in the new standing rigging installation. As Victoria will be out of the water and in a probably less than child friendly environment, this means we’ll be based ashore in Auckland on our arrival for a few weeks, so we are looking for a base at the moment. We plan to move on board in April and gradually make our way North up the coast doing sea trials, safety and familiarisation for everyone and prepping the boat for a passage to Tonga in mid-May (weather dependent of course).

So that’s about it for now. Laura and I feel we are on track with a boat, an excited and able crew and a rough initial plan for when we get to New Zealand, but who knows what the children are thinking about their parents' crazy plan... We’ll keep you posted!

Happy New Year and take care out there,

Cheers,

Angus and Laura xx