NZ Land Logs 40, Year 2: A Beautiful Fall Day in Whangarei
Date: Friday, March 30, 2007
Weather Today: Warm with Clear Blue Skies
Location: Whangarei, New Zealand
It continued to rain during the night, but at some point it slacked off and by morning we awoke to the clearest blue skies imaginable. The blue skies and sunshine were certainly welcome after two days of solid rain. I spent the first part of the morning talking via Skype on the computer to my sister Patsy and her husband Joe, and my brother Dickie and his wife Conda. We hooked up our webcam so they could see us, but they are not yet brave enough to have a camera on their end. It’s fantastic to be able to talk to family back home and it is even more fantastic that it is absolutely free. My brother and sister were together watching WVU play Clemson. In New Zealand, rugby and cricket rule, not basketball, so that is not something we see here.
Mark rode his bicycle into town today to pick up the spare motor we had ordered months ago for our auto pilot and to go to the post office to mail some things back home. It was our auto pilot that failed when we were attempting to leave Tonga. We were successful in getting a new motor sent to us there from New Zealand, but they did not have a second motor to send us that we could use as a backup. They ordered that for us, but when it came in we were in the US and they sent it back. We had to reorder when we came back in February, so we now have the backup motor ready to go in case of another failure. I spent the day continuing to organize things in the boat. I found items that could be vacuum-packed and stored away, so we got out the FoodSaver and did the necessary vacuum packing. This method assures that books won’t get damp when stored away and metal items won’t rust. We love it and use it often. It took most of the afternoon to get things packed away and change our spreadsheets to reflect the new location for certain items. By late afternoon, we were ready to get out and enjoy the beautiful day before it ended. We walked over to the Town Basin and visited with Judy and Roger of Hanoah (from Maine) and Arnie of Jade (from Hong Kong). I talked with Roger about our plans/non-plans for this next season and Mark talked with Arnie about the work we have to do while we are out of the water. We then borrowed the Town Basin dinghy and rowed out to see Artic Fox. We wanted to inspect their hull painting job and assess whether or not we might want to paint our fiberglass topsides when we are out of the water in a week or so. We had heard that Arctic Fox had used the New Zealand paint that promises that anyone can do a professional paint job, so we wanted to see the results. Their boat looks great, but we are still unsure that we want to do this.
Tonight and tomorrow night are the last two nights of a month long festival here in Whangarei. We were not here for most of the festivities, but they have put up a drive-in movie type screen and are showing movies outside tonight and tomorrow night. Since we had walked into town once today, we decided not to walk back for tonight’s move, “The Fastest Indian,” but we might go in tomorrow night to see “Happy Feet.” In fact, I’m pretty sure we’ll have to make it in to see that one. I just can’t resist penguins.
Note About Our Logs and Photos: During our month of New Zealand travels, we were struggling to keep our logs posted each day. We thought we had been successful, but when we got an email today from Alan and Helaine saying that many of our logs were not on the website, we couldn’t figure out why. On our computers, we could see all the logs, but then we are the website administrators. We finally discovered that any log that we have edited wasn’t showing up for others as these logs were marked as private. We have gone back and marked all of those as published logs, so hopefully there should now be a log for each day of the past month. There are also pictures with each log during our land trek. Just click on the one picture displayed at the end of each log and the total photo gallery for that day will come up. We apologize for the missing logs that should now magically reappear. We are still learning about this whole website administration thing.
