This summer here in New Zealand has been unusually cool and windy so far. There has been day after day of high SW winds. To make up for it, they scheduled a NE storm. We left Great Barrier Island on a light E wind and sailed to eastern end of Waiheke Island where we could get some good storm protection. Waiheke is a busy tourist island world renown for its vineyards. It is an easy ferry ride over from Auckland. The forecast was for 35kts NE winds gusting 45kts. We were in one of these blows last year while in Gt. Barrier. In that case there were probably 200 boats anchored in the two coves where we were. By morning at least 30 of them had dragged anchor. We wanted to avoid that experience this time, so we chose to anchor under the cliffs at Waiti Bay – see the star on the chart above. By nightfall we were the only sailboat in there with a 3 other smaller powerboats anchored closer in. The Met Service had changed the forecast to NNE 45kts gusting to 55kts. That some serious wind. We had a ton of chain laid out and knew our Spade anchor was well dug into the mud-shell bottom. It turned out to be a pretty mild evening behind the cliffs with the max winds in the low 30s for us. In the end no drama.
Morning came and the winds shifted more to the west, so we picked up anchor and motored a mile and half west to Man O’ War Bay. Somehow I forgot to get a picture of this, but on the way in we noticed a barge anchored just off the north shore. It was a trash barge. It had a few dozen green garbage bins on it for trash and recycle. You jump in your dinghy and drop off the stuff that has been building up on the boat for weeks. Nice.
We headed into the shore to do some hiking. With Chris’ new, titanium hip she’s back to dragging me on death marches. It was an hour and half of hiking on mostly road to the World War II gun battery that overlooks the Hauraki Gulf. It is called Stony Batter; I have no idea why it is not called Stony Battery.
During construction it was a top-secret site. They hand dug hundreds of yards of tunnels to store ammunition and to have secure locations to calculate gunnery targets.
One of the 9 inch gun bases with connecting tunnels.
A couple of replica shells on top of a tunnel ventilation shaft. The 9.2inch guns could fire over 31,000 yards (30 km) with a max rate of fire of one round per minute.
The Stony Batter took an excessive amount of effort in a remote location to build. Keeping the construction secret made it even tougher. It didn’t do much to protect the US fleet in the Haruki Gulf from the Japanese, as it wasn’t completed till after the war with the only test firing of the guns taking place in 1951.
After the three hours of hiking we stopped into the Man O’ War winery tasting room conveniently located just up the beach from where we landed the dinghy. After sobering up there was some boat work to do. This is the high-pressure pump for our Village Marine watermaker. It was past do for a rebuild/service after giving good service over the past 2000 hours use.
We moved over to the main anchorage on Waiheke, Oneroa. This is the main town and tourist destination. There are some nice hikes along the headlands that lead out of the bay.
The trails took us through the University of Auckland experimental vineyard. This is Chardonnay Clone 6 here. We saw some bright red and green NZ parrots enjoying the pre-wine grapes here, but they were not in a photographic mood.
Turns out other governments build walls too. This one was built by the Auckland Council to ensure the headland trail was passable. I don’t believe they tried to get the Australians to pay for it.
“Paint the Walls Grey and the Mind Will Follow”
Painted on a cargo container in the Univ of Auckland vineyard. Now I know I said I would follow the US Coast Guard regulations of only one political blog per month on cruising blogs, but I think if I read the story correctly online Trump signed excutive orders that ordered the government to loosen up on these types of regulations. I have not read the detail of the EO yet, but I do hope they back off a little.
Both Chris and I are covered by ACA compliant health insurance policies (Obamacare for those that aren’t sure the two are connected). They have reduced our medical insurance costs significantly compared to the policies we had prior to the ACA. I’m really glad to hear that the Trumplican replacement for ACA will cover everyone.
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We were informed the weather was part of New Zealand's National Defense. That's why we exclusively land traveled. Put 'er in park and you're anchored for the night!
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