Tue, 14 May 2002
Greetings to All --
We are finally finished with all of our various boat projects, well at least the ones that were on the must do list before we were to leave New Zealand. It looks like we have a good weather window and plan to leave tomorrow morning. The weather has been a bit "unkind" as the kiwis would say and very few boats have left in the past week. Today things looked pretty good and 24 boats checked out and headed off to their South Pacific Island of choice including, Niue, Tonga, Fiji, Vanauta, and more. We will head back to Tonga again for a month as there were a few places we missed when we were there last year and we are interested to see how the Vava'u Group faired from Tropical Cyclone Waka that passed directly overhead on New Year's Eve. From there we are thinking up heading to Wallis, a small French island, then will spend most of the cruising season in Fiji which we have heard is fantastic cruising and very inexpensive. We are looking forward to getting back to the tropics, the turquoise water and warmer weather.
We certainly have enjoyed and appreciate the Kiwi boating spirit. There are lots of great boats here in New Zealand and Kiwis are not afraid of building their own boat or of making the changes they want themselves. During our stay here we have adjusted to Kiwi boating terms - power boats are launches, wooden boats are timber boats, sailboats are yachts - and we like alot of the boats that we see here. More boats have tillers than wheels, opposite of things in the states, and most boats also have swim steps in back for easy access for swimming and getting in and out of the dinghy. You regularily see kiwis taking a morning or afternoon swim off their boats in water that we certainly do not consider all that warm. Boats down here also have much larger engines than in the states. Where a 43 foot boat in the states would perhaps have a 37 horse power engine, here it would have at least a 50hp and more likely a 60hp as Kiwis don't want to mess around if there is no wind and they want to get somewhere. Kiwis are also not shy about their boat names and they are proudly displayed, frequently with large letters and bold graphics, on the sides of boats and include names like Pretty Boy Floyd, Sweet As, Jesse James, and Voodoo Lounge just to name a few.
People in New Zealand seem generally more relaxed and many things that would cause great distress at home are just easily taken in stride. We have enjoyed having access to just about anything that we would want to buy in the past five months but also found provisioning for this next season of cruising to be not as "frantic" as it was when we left Panama over a year ago. We now know that you can easily get the "basics" out in the islands and so have stocked up more on special treats and are not worrying about the rest.
Hope this finds everyone well and enjoying nice spring weather. Keep in touch.
Cheers for now -- Suzette and Paul