{"id":209,"date":"2008-05-10T22:23:44","date_gmt":"2008-05-10T22:23:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sabbatical3.net\/blog\/2008\/05\/10\/back-to-the-boat\/"},"modified":"2025-10-01T16:55:53","modified_gmt":"2025-10-01T16:55:53","slug":"back-to-the-boat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sabbatical3.net\/blog\/?p=209","title":{"rendered":"Back to the boat"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/span>May 11, 2008<\/p>\n

\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 We left from the Providence airport for New Zealand on Monday morning, May 5th<\/sup>.\u00a0 Our good friend Robin Ringer picked us up from our comfortable sabbatical house at 20 Cooke Street along with our eleven bags.\u00a0 Luckily, she has a huge SUV otherwise everything would not fit.\u00a0 The photo below shows us outside T.F. Green airport <\/span>with the seven large duffels <\/span>that we checked<\/span><\/span>-in.\u00a0 Check-in was a lengthy but not difficult process.\u00a0 They charged us $88 per extra bag all the way to Auckland, as we had been told.\u00a0 Quite a bargain.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0At the Providence airpor<\/em>t<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

\n

\u00a0 We had a four hour layover in Chicago and Hannah took the airport bus from Evanston to see us.\u00a0 We had lunch at the airport Hilton and then sat in the sun beneath the control tower.\u00a0 It was the fifth time we were able to see her since our return.\u00a0 It was so nice to just be with her for a few hours.\u00a0 We only wish Ben could have been there too.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0 The next leg took us to LA before the 12 hour + Air New Zealand flight to Auckland.\u00a0 We did manage a few hours of sleep on the flight and arrived at 5:30 am in a reasonably coherent state of mind.\u00a0 We were prepared for some trouble at customs since normal tourists do not travel with nearly 450 pounds of baggage.\u00a0 On the customs form, I check both the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153yes\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153no\u00e2\u20ac\u009d box on whether we had more than $700 of possessions, figuring that would cover all the bases.\u00a0 The customs guy looked at our piles of stuff and waved us through.\u00a0 <\/span><\/p>\n

Our rented Toyota Camry had just enough room for everything once we moved the front seats all the way up.\u00a0 We headed out into rush hour traffic until we came to a distant suburb and stopped for breakfast.\u00a0 The weather was great \u00e2\u20ac\u201c sunny skies and temperature in the 60\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s.\u00a0 The past two weeks had been stormy on the North Island so we were quite lucky.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0The drive up to Whangarei was beautiful.\u00a0 Everything was green and lush with only a few traces of the impending winter.\u00a0 When we arrived at Riverside Drive Marina we were happy to see that our boat was in the water.\u00a0 It had just gone in that morning (Wednesday, May 7).\u00a0 The bad weather had kept all the boats in the water pinned to the dock so there was no room for us until just that morning.\u00a0 With the weather change, a lot of boats took off north (including our friends on Risho Maru<\/em>), leaving room for new boats to enter the water.\u00a0 Sabbatical III<\/em> looked good but there was a bit of mildew down below in spite of our friend Bo\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s regular airing of the boat.<\/span><\/p>\n

Fortunately, it was high tide so dragging our bags to the boat was a bit easier than it could have been.\u00a0 At high tide the car-park and the dock are at the same level.\u00a0 At low tide, it is a steep drop to the dock.\u00a0 In the middle of this process, Michael and Britta of Vera<\/em> came over from Town Basin, where Vera lies, to greet us and help with the last bags.\u00a0 It was so nice to see them again and begin to catch up on news.\u00a0 Vera<\/em> had also been stuck on the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153hard\u00e2\u20ac\u009d by bad weather and was put back in the water just that morning too.\u00a0 She was hauled only to get anti-fouling paint applied to her hull but the rain made it a two week long ordeal.\u00a0 In spite of our fatigue, Laura and I emptied our bags into various piles inside the boat.\u00a0 Only our sleeping berth was not completely covered in stuff.\u00a0 The Vera\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s <\/em>then treated us to a nice meal at an Indian restaurant in town.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Putting on the new genoa<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

\n

<\/p>\n

Installing the AIS at the navigation station <\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

\n

The inside of the boat is still a mess as I write this (Sunday May 11), but now the piles are more sensibly sorted by type of stuff.\u00a0 We have actually moved along fairly quickly with our preparations to head north.\u00a0 There were light winds yesterday, so Dave Parr (\u00e2\u20ac\u0153Waldo\u00e2\u20ac\u009d) of Calibre Sails, our sailmaker, \u00a0came over to put up our new sails.\u00a0 They are clean and white and crinkle in the breeze.\u00a0 With some help from Michael and Britta, I installed our new AIS (Automatic Identification System) and was able to get AIS data and GPS\/depth\/wind data from our Raymarine Seatalk network to be understood and displayed on our laptop. We are well connected to the outside world here.\u00a0 We bought a SIM for our cell phone at the airport which has proved very useful.\u00a0 I set up our new directional wireless antenna and wireless router so that we now have excellent access to the internet plus our own inside-the-boat network. \u00a0The other projects we completed in the past two days include putting new weather seals on all the outside lockers, reattaching our backstays, and replacing our VHF radio handset with one we bought in the US.\u00a0 We have heaps of food, wine, and engine oil that still need to be put away and more shopping to do, plus some more boat projects.\u00a0 We may be able to finish on Wednesday.\u00a0 Then, if the weather cooperates, we will head north to Opua.\u00a0 Vera<\/em> hopes to do the same.\u00a0 We probably could not reach Opua until Saturday.\u00a0 We can only leave Whangarei at high tide and on Thursday high tide is late in the afternoon.\u00a0 That gets us only to the opening of the river at Urquhart Bay.\u00a0 It would be difficult to get from there to Opua in one day especially with the short days of mid-May.<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

M.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\u00a0Looking forward inside Sabbatical III<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Where to put all this?<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

\n

\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

May 11, 2008 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 We left from the Providence airport for New Zealand on Monday morning, May 5th.\u00a0 Our good friend Robin Ringer picked us up from our comfortable sabbatical house at 20 Cooke Street along with our eleven bags.\u00a0 Luckily, she has a huge SUV otherwise everything would not fit.\u00a0 The photo below shows … <\/p>\n

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