Its been 10 days since the last blog – I probably need to try and do shorter blogs more often otherwise its difficult remembering what’s been going on. It’s a good job we have a ships log which records our daily activities.
We were really just waiting for Sam to join
us on the 27th Feb so spent the time looking around some more areas in
the bay. First stop was a place called Honeymoon
Bay on Motuarohia Island. This was a
beautiful anchorage – very sheltered from the wind and not that busy. We spent three days anchored here doing not
much more than relaxing and
swimming. We did go for a hike around
the island one day which turned into a four hour epic after we took a wrong
turn and ended up bush bashing for about an hour. The islands are all very green with vegetation
right down to the water and the coast pockmarked with small pebbly or sandy
beaches. Typically the windward side is pretty
rocky and rough but the beaches in the lee are stunning. The highlight of our stay here was a feed of fresh
mussels which we had bought in a store in Russell and cooked up on board.
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| Honeymoon Bay |
I wanted to try and navigate up a very narrow and shallow river to a place called Kerikeri which is in the north east part of the Bay of Islands so after Honeymoon Bay we relocated to the north first to a quiet bay called Wharengaere Bay. This was a very shallow protected bay where we were on our own. Nik tried fishing with her new rod but was not very successful. The next day we relocated close to the entrance to the Kerikeri river ready for the transit the following day.
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| The Mussel Dinner |
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| Nik Helming |
The Kerikeri river is extremely shallow however Sea Otter has a retractable keel which means that we can lower our draft to 1.3m. Some areas of the river were charted at 0.0m water depth meaning that only on a tide of say 1.5 to 2.0m could we navigate up it. We picked a suitable rising tide on Sunday 23rd Feb and started into the river mouth proper. We probably made it about a mile upstream when the depth sounder showed about 1.5m in a particularly narrow section. At that stage, caution being preferable to rash bravery, we abandoned the attempt – it would have probably been OK but without further local knowledge we were not willing to risk a possible grounding.
We turned around and steamed back into the approaches to the river mouth. That night we anchored in Wairoa Bay and thought of what could have been. As something of a conciliation we threw a line over the side and, I kid you not, within about 10 mins we had four snapper on deck. We filleted these and had a fantastic dinner. So impressed were we that we decided to stay and the next night Nik pulled in three more which we baked for dinner – this place really is a fishing El-Dorado.
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| Sea Otter at Anchor |
The time had come to start back to the marina
where we would pick up Sam. The next two
days were spent in a berth in the marina.
We cleaned up the boat and did another big provisioning trip. Sam arrived onboard last night and today we
headed out again to the islands before heading north out of the Bay of Islands
area towards Cape Reinga at the tip of the North Island.
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