Well, this is it.. England, here we come!

Up she goes - on the deck of the ship

This is our last day in New Zealand.  Tomorrow, we fly home.  It is a funny mixture of excitement and sadness.  We are saying fond farewells to our friends here, whilst at the same time looking forward to seeing our friends and families at home.  We especially cannot wait to celebrate in person my brother Will and my new sister-in-law Jules.  They were finally able to get married last week - wahoo!!  The last few weeks have been so hectic that we haven't had much time to ponder the changes that lie ahead for us.  The main thing in our minds about the returning home is that life will be restricted, from a covid point of view, whereas here we are completely free.  And we know that for everyone at home, the restrictions are a part of normal life now, but it will be a big change for us.  The period of time we spent here in strict lockdown feels like a long time ago now.

Preparing Victoria for the ship

We put Victoria on to a ship in Tauranga, the Floretgracht (for those who have the marine traffic app)  the day before yesterday.  It was all quite stressful, as the loading date was fairly fluid, and they only confirmed it 12 hours before we had to be at the ship.  Tauranga is very tidal, so it has to be slack water - either high tide or low tide.  Low tide was at midday on our loading date, which meant that both high tides were in the dark - around 6am and 6pm.  We were given the 6am slot.  We had completely moved off the boat and were staying with our lovely friends, David and Sue, who live a 45 minute drive away.  So we had a pretty early start!  We left the marina in pitch dark and motored to the ship, fenders on the port side as requested.  Just as we were about to come alongside, the loadmaster changed his mind, and we had to move everything to the starboard side and approach from the other direction.  Amazingly, David had come with us to join in the fun, and Sue had stayed at home with the children, which made the whole process a thousand times less stressful for us.  Angus drove us alongside, and the stevedores threw down huge strops for us to tie up to.  They then started lobbing more straps, strops and lines down on to our foredeck, with no shout of a warning, bringing it home to us why we were required to wear hard hats!  Before we knew it, two divers were in the water to position the biggest strops under the boat, and then off we hopped, and up she went.  Angus went aboard again once she was in position on the ship, and he did all the final hard work - disconnecting the batteries, final stowing emptying out salt water from the engine pipes etc.  Two more boats were loaded on the midday tide, and the ship set off that evening, bound for Brisbane.  There is currently a huge gale off the north tip of New Zealand, with 6-metres waves, so in fact the Floretgracht is just hanging around off the north-east coast until conditions improve, before clearing Cape Reinga and heading west.  It is very unnerving for us - although we did everything we could to prepare Victoria for the ship, there is still the nagging doubt that things could escape our stowing and lashing, and then be rolling around for the next 50 days, until she reaches Southampton.  We are trying not to become obsessed with looking at marine traffic and the weather, but it is hard.

David doing some childminding duties, on a particularly rainy day

It was quite an undertaking moving off Victoria, and getting her clean and ready for shipping.  We would never have managed it without our wonderful Royal Cruising Club friends, David and Sue.  They had us to stay for over a week, cooked for us night after night, looked after the children, lent us their car, and were generally completely amazing.  There were several lemon, mandarin and avocado trees just outside their house, and an array of magical birds and wildlife to keep the children entertained.  We will so miss the bird life of New Zealand - the rosellas, pukekos, tuis and white-eyes.  After saying farewell to Victoria, we took ourselves to a campsite for an afternoon dip (in the rain) in some local hot mineral pools.  The main pool was 34 degrees and the hot pool was 40 degrees.  They are emptied every evening and refilled from the hot springs for the following day.  It is amazing to be in such an exotic, volcanic place.  We certainly will miss New Zealand.

When this is all that is left of your courtesy flag, it is time to leave New Zealand..

Having said that, it is winter here, and we are quite looking forward to a little bit of summer.  New Zealand has been wilder than usual recently.  Shortly before we relaunched Victoria, a tornado ripped through Norsand Boatyard, leaving a trail of destruction.  We were having dinner with friends from the Pacific Rally, Nick and Haidee and their children.  We watched an incredible electrical storm from their house, and it poured with rain, but we didn’t think too much of it.  When we returned to the boatyard later that evening, we could see, even through the driving rain, that all was not well.  Firstly, there were a lot of people walking around in the dark wearing headtorches, which was very unusual.  Secondly, we could see a dinghy at a very odd angle, half-way up the rig of a boat near to us, which was not usually there.  And thirdly - something we only noticed when we looked around a bit more -  there was a large yacht just 50m from us, which was lying on its side.  Gradually the events of the evening unfolded; a tornado had hit around 7.30pm, knocking over at least seven boats, lifting up a shed and dropping it a few feet to one side, picking up a dinghy and impaling it on the rigging of a ketch, and causing sheer havoc to some neatly laid out masts in the riggers yard.  A trimaran, with its owner on board, was lifted up in the air, spun 90 degrees, and then dropped again in almost exactly the same spot.  A few boats were left leaning precariously on their cradles, fortunately without damage, meanwhile many of use were completely untouched.  Some people were finding kit which had been under their boats hundreds of metres away; whereas I had left my flip flops on the step at the back of our boat, and they had hardly moved an inch.  It was quite incredible how localised the effects of the tornado were.  Miraculously, no-one was hurt.  And amazingly for us, not only did we escape unscathed, but we were not on board when the weather went through.  Apparently, it sounded like an express train charging past; the boats were buffeted, and it was terrifying.  The outcome was desperately sad for some owners, whose level of insurance was not sufficient to cover the damage their boats sustained. 

The destruction of the tornado   

We were lucky to be able to relaunch as planned, on the monday after the tornado, before spending a final few days in Whangarei town basin marina.  We were hoping for a fairly relaxed few days - saying goodbye to friends, cleaning the boat properly, putting our sails back on etc, before heading south to Tauranga.  In fact it ended up being rather stressful.  Whilst in the boatyard, Angus and our friend Steve had done an amazing job of replacing our “drive train”.  (The drive train is basically everything behind the engine and gearbox.  It involves the propeller shaft, a coupling which attaches it to the back of the gear box, a seal to stop water entering the boat where the prop shaft exits, a bracket beneath the boat to support the end of the prop shaft, and the propeller itself.)  It was a big job, the slightly niche technicalities of which Angus will be delighted to share with anyone who wants to know.  We had also taken our propeller to a “prop whisperer”, who had extended it by half an inch, and were excited to see if this would give us a bit of extra speed through the water.  We had tested the engine in neutral on the hard and all was fine.  Once in the water, we were able to try her in gear for the first time.  We were not anticipating a problem, but if you can imagine the sound you would get if you filled a large bag with spanners, and shook it as though your life depended on it, that is the rather sickening noise that came from gearbox.  Bad news.  We had never had a noise like this before, plus Angus had only just had our gearbox off and in for a service to address a slow oil leak.  

Relaunch at Norsand.  Before the "chatter" fiasco..

We stopped the engine, checked it, scratched our heads, started it again, and tried reverse – which was fine.  We tried forwards again, and we frowned and grimaced some more as the clanking clattering noise persisted.  We checked our set-up, took videos, phoned friends, and pulled worried faces at our boatyard buddies who had gathered on the dock to wave us off.  It is not unusual for a boat to be pulled back up the slipway after a failed launch; was this our fate?  Soon, we were joined on board by Kevin, who works at the boatyard.  We talked him through what we had changed on the engine.  After some discussion, he suggested the bag of spanners noise might be "just a bit of low revs chatter”, and what we needed to do was give it some beans.  So we tried again, and nervously inched her up to 1000 revs, at which point the noise disappeared completely and everything sounded normal.  The boatyard were desperate for our cradle, as they had lost several in the tornado, so Kevin persuaded us to head upriver to the marina with our “chattering” engine, and sort it out there.  So off we went, either extremely fast or in neutral, and tied up next to our friends Mike and Kellie, on Dash.

Angus resealing our freshly varnished forward hatch - another labour of love

That was monday.  To cut a long story short, Angus spent the whole of tuesday taking our engine apart to get to the fly wheel and the metal drive plate.  On wednesday, he drove two and a half hours each way to Auckland to have our fly wheel machined to fit a replacement rubber drive plate, and he spent all of thursday putting the whole thing back together again.  With our hearts in our mouths, we fired her up on thursday evening, and slipped her into gear.  She sounded absolutely perfect!  We pretty much cried with relief, and our neighbour Mike couldn't help himself from coming aboard with a celebratory rum and coke for both of us.  I cannot explain how brilliant Angus is with tasks like this on Victoria.  I know some of his friends from his early years might think he doesn't know one end of a spanner from another, but believe me - he does now!  I'm fairly sure most boat owners have never been near their drive plate or fly wheel, and would probably not be brave enough to take on the challenge themselves if the need arose.

Angus at work in the engine again..

After all the engine shenanigans, it was time to say goodbye to all of Eloise and George's friends from Parua Bay School.  They were made so welcome there, by the staff and the children, and were very sad to leave.  A term at school was a completely unexpected bonus of covid for us.  I had the opportunity to help quite a bit in both of their classrooms - mostly with reading - for the time that they were there.  Eloise invited now fewer than 17 girls to her party.  Luckily the weather was great, so we were able to spend most of it in the park, including a delivery of pizzas.  It was pretty interesting getting them all on board for a "movie".  They were much too excited to sit and watch it, so just rushed around the boat and then got really claustrophobic so most of us went back to the park!  We had George's party the following morning.  Luckily he only invited five friends so it was a bit easier to manage.  By lunch time, we had returned all the children safely back to their parents, with Victoria still in one piece, and noone having fallen in the water, so we felt we had done pretty well.  To celebrate, I sent Angus up the mast for a rig check and then we put our sails back on, before a farewell dinner with our lovely boat friends, the Blue Zulus and the Amphitreetes.  

George and his boys

Eloise and her girls

Finally, we waved goodbye to Whangarei, and then had two hugely contrasting passages on our way south to Tauranga.  Our first was a downwind sleigh ride to Great Barrier.  The forecast was 25 gusting 35 knots, from directly behind us, with a 2m swell.  The forecast the following day was considerably worse, so we decided to go for it.  With just a handkerchief of jib up, we were racing along at 6-8 knots. Victoria felt very stable, if a little rolly, and it was a lot of fun to be sailing again!  The children were extremely low maintenance on the passage - having been landlubbers for so long, they were rather green, so they just lay down and didn't need feeding at all.  Jack was sick at one point, whilst Angus and I were both up in the cockpit.  He managed to get up from where he was sitting, run round to the galley, grab a saucepan from the cupboard, and get back to to his seat just in time, catching it all neatly and making no mess whatsoever.  I took the saucepan, gave him a drink of water, and in the next breath he asked if he could carry on playing minecraft.  Now there's a good boat kid!  We were anchored in Smokehouse Bay before dark, soon to be joined by our friends on Max, and before long the fire and the pizza oven were lit, the children were on the rope swings, and we all started to relax.  We stayed at the Barrier to let some fairly crazy weather blow through, before setting sail to Tauranga, just over 100 miles south.

At anchor in Smokehouse Bay on a stormy day

Keeping warm by the fire at Smokehouse

We could not have asked for better conditions for our final passage in New Zealand.  We thought we might have too little wind to sail, but actually the sea was so flat that we were able to make 4-5 knots in just 8-10 knots of breeze.  Down below, it didn't even feel like we were at sea.  On deck, it was sunny by day, and clear and cold at night.  It's winter here, so we were in our full sailing kit - thermals, oilees, sea boots, hats and snoods - and hot water bottles for bed.  We had day dolphins and night dolphins; our night friends stayed with us for a good couple of hours.  We could see them around the boat; graceful silver bullets in the faint phosporescence.  And we could hear them from the cockpit, blowing out as they surfaced, just by our stern - showing us the way, and wishing us well on our voyage.  All the children came on deck for a bit of night watch, and we had a fantastic view of the ISS, thanks to the app on Angus' phone.  It was a magical 24 hours, and such a contrast to our wild, hold-on-to-your-hats trip a couple of days earlier.  And so we arrived in Tauranga happy and in high spirits, five days ahead of our earliest possible load date on the ship, which was just about the minimum time to do what was needed. 

Early morning arrival in Tauranga

And so, we are returning home almost seventeen months after we set off, and we are excited about what lies ahead.  We have learnt so much on this trip - about ourselves, each other, and the world around us.  We could not have imagined that covid would change the world in the ways that it has.  I think it's fair to say that everyone has become more adaptable in recent months, as "normal" life for everyone has changed beyond recognition.  Angus and I have amazed ourselves in what we have achieved, including all sorts of new skills which we have learned and put into action.  Similarly, the children have been incredible in their adaptability, as children tend to be.  They left home, left school, moved on to a boat, and adapted to home school, and slipped into being "boat kids".  Then they became "boatyard kids", and then settled in to school and became "kiwi kids".  As we look ahead to how life will be back in Winchester, they all seem very relaxed about the fact that they have all been allocated places at different schools.  Only Jack has a place at Westgate, so far.  Meanwhile, Eloise and George feel reassured to know that they settled quickly into a new school here in New Zealand, so are not really fazed by the possibility of going to different schools at home.  It will require an extra level of planning from the parents...

Kiwi kids (no shoes), boat kids (thermals, unbrushed hair..)

On this trip, we have learned to expect the unexpected.  We focus on the things we can control, and we spend time thinking of plenty of contingency plans for when things change.  As a family, I think we all now believe that we can do anything if we put our minds to it.  With forward planning and some committed effort, nothing is impossible.  But it won't just happen - you have to go out and get it!  The other thing that has been an overriding theme of our whole trip is how amazingly supported we have been by those around us, both friends and strangers.  We could not have imagined or anticipated the kindness we have been shown, from before we left home, to our time here in New Zealand, and all the people we have met, and friendships we have cultivated along the way.  A special mention here must go to all of our New Zealand sailing friends from the Royal Cruising Club, who have taken us under their wings, treated us like their own family, and made all of this possible.  You all know who you are; thank you.  Our hospitality awaits whenever and wherever we may meet again.

So bon voyage to Victoria on board the Floretgracht, and we are grateful that there are still some flights meaning that we, too, can get home.  We have face masks and hand gel at the ready.  We plan to leave the kids to the in-flight entertainment, and Angus and I are hoping to have a good, long sleep on the plane.

Thanks for following us and for your support and encouragement.  I will write an update when Victoria arrives safely in Southampton on the Floretgracht, and send some pictures of her in her new home.

For now - farewell and fair winds from all of the salty sea dogs,

Laura, Angus, Eloise, George and Jack Xxx

It'll be back to "normal" gymnastics soon (hopefully..)