Off to Whangarei   Thursday, 01/02/2024

This morning we left Marsden Cove Marina, headed up Whangarei Harbour bound for Riverside Drive Marina, which is right in town. Not a long trip: about 11.5 nautical miles, which took just over 2 hours. 

The big excitement of this trip is that towards the end of it there is a bascule bridge which has to be opened to let any craft taller than 6.5 metres to pass through. Given that Manuka’s air draft is 17.65 metres (58 feet), this meant us. You call them by phone or radio, and during the day the wait is only about 5 minutes for the road traffic to be stopped and the bridge opened. We arrived at the bridge and there was a catamaran tied to a pontoon waiting to enter, and another boat waiting to come through from the other direction. I called and the woman said they’d been having a problem with the bridge opening and that I might need to wait 15 minutes. I turned around and drifted slowly down river, but after just a few minutes I heard a loud announcement stating that the bridge was closing. And up it went! (It is a single leaf bascule bridge, just one side opening. Some bascule bridges are two leaf, both sides opening). 

So we were through very quickly, and the marina is only a few hundred metres further upriver. I arrived and motored straight into the lift-out dock. I’d timed the arrival at the bridge carefully, because high water was at 13:07 – Manuka wouldn’t be able to get up this far at low water because some of the time the depth would be less than 1.5 metres. At high water you have an extra 2.8 metres, giving plenty of clearance. 

We came out of the water pretty quickly. I was very pleased to see that there was only very modest growth on the hull: mostly it was just slimy – which a jet wash easily removed. The hull is coated in Coppercoat, which seems to be working well. (Each litre of Coppercoat contains 2kg of fine copper powder; sea water attacks the copper, causing cuprous oxide to form, which deters marine growth). 

I was in lengthy conversation with Terry, the owner of Alloy Stainless here, concerning how the stern arch will be repaired. It’ll be a big job: his estimate is anything from 85 to 100 hours. But good to know that this crucial repair is about to start taking shape. It’s great to feel that there is progress! 

Otherwise, I had a very pleasant surprise last Friday evening… I had been for a long walk along to One Tree Point and was returning, walking up B dock, and suddenly there was a loud “It’s Hans… Hans… I can’t believe it!” It was my old friends Ian and Laura from Dorset, who I met at Immigration in English Harbour, Antigua on the day I arrived in the Caribbean in April 2021. Lovely to see them. They were having dinner on a friend’s boat, but suggested I meet them for a drink on Saturday evening. We had an excellent catch-up, so good in fact that we then agreed to meet for lunch on Monday. After last seeing them in Grenada in late 2021, our courses diverged: I went north through the islands, while they headed west, to Colombia and then Panama, and through the Panama Canal in early 2022. Their boat has been on the hard at Marsden Cove for almost a year: they spent about 3 months travelling the South Island of New Zealand by car and then went to the U.K. for 7 months to see their respective children and Laura’s grandchildren. They’d only returned to New Zealand two weeks ago. So, with very different schedules, it was a great coincidence that we should suddenly meet at Marsden Cove. The photo below shows the joy I think!