NZ Land Logs 38, Year 2: From Whangarei to Whanga’rain’
Date: Wednesday, March 28, 2007
Weather Today: Rain and More Rain
Location: Whangarei, New Zealand
I think our friend Dianna on White Swan coined the phrase Whangarain back in December. We were back in the States for the holidays and she was emailing us updates on Windbird. We were having beautiful weather in New England, but she was having rain and more rain here in Whangarei. Well, the rain is back. Sprinkles have left us and we are now having honest to goodness Whangarain. We are supposed to get 4 inches in the next 24 hours and some people are saying that the bad weather is going to be with us for another whole week. At least it is a warm rain, but it does make getting out and about a little difficult. We no longer have the rental van, so we are walking or biking everywhere or nowhere as we did today. We made it up the ramp for the cruiser share meeting at 2:00 and the rain cooperated by not pouring and blowing while we were meeting in the covered barbeque area. We had a great turn out and made some progress, but looking at charts in this weather was a little difficult. We combined our resources and are copying those things that we can to share. On Monday of next week we will look at charts again.
As we gathered our resources for the next season for today’s meeting we found we are better off in terms of charts then we thought, but we are definitely cruising guide deficient. When one of the other cruisers looked at our charts they asked us if we had hit the lottery. These charts are SO expensive here in New Zealand, but we explained that the charts were bought before we started cruising. That was when we were working and had a steady income. There will be no more of these beautiful charts for us. We are now on a cruising budget and we will have to “beg, borrow, and copy” what we can from now on. We are very thankful that for Christmas, our son Justin got us the Lonely Planet guides to Fiji and New Caledonia/Vanuatu. These won’t get us into the harbors, but they will serve us well once we arrive. In the absence of good cruising guides, we are sure glad to have these. I just finished tabbing the various sections of those guides. I was somewhat familiar with some of the names of the Fiji islands, but I have never heard of any of the Vanuatu or New Caledonia islands. Much to learn. And we will still need some sort of cruising guides to get us into harbor. We have a little cruising guide for Fiji, but we don’t have the similar guides for New Caledonia and Vanuatu. Today we found out that there is a Moorings guide for Fiji that we didn’t know about and there is a wonderful cruising guide for New Caledonia but it costs $105NZ. I think we will have to make it to New Caledonia without that one.
There’s not much else to report today. Mark spent the day on his computer updating our finances or lack there of. I spent my day continuing to update our photo files. I am still working on naming photos of New Zealand when we first arrived plus all of the pictures we took while visiting at home in the US. Maybe tomorrow we will start facing the boat work that needs to be done. But for now, we’ll pretend that it is not there and enjoy these slower-paced rainy days.
