Whangaroa

Just put down our anchor in Whangaroa Harbour. Time to relax and sleep. Now we have 4 days to make our way to the Bay of Islands which is just around the corner.
The day before yesterday at night I saw something I had never seen before: must have been a comet falling down. It was a long green tail and then a huge green explosion in the atmosphere, like a big fireworks. That was unexpected and really amazing. And the only "event" on this trip. Good night.

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Sailing up

2,5 days ago we left Nelson to sail up to and around the north island at Cape Reinga. The first 12 hrs were great sailing as we left in gale warning and with 25-30kn of wind we averaged about 9 knots speed. Then, at the height of Mt. Taranaki (Egmont) the wind died the first time in the lee of the massive volcano. It came back for a while and then died completely. Having motored for a day we set up the spinnaker last night but had to take it down in the middle of the night due to no wind. This morning finally we got to set the sails again and are now slowly sailing up the north west coast. We're at the height of the Kauri tree forests now, not too far away from Hokianga Harbour. Tomorrow morning we're due to round Cape Reinga. A front with rain and hopefully a bit more wind will come through. In the afternoon we should pass the north cape and start our way down towards Bay of Islands. We might take a short break in Mangonui to have some fish&chips but we have to keep going south quickly before the SE wind gets too strong and it will get impossible to tack in front of it on our way down. Because we will be sailing our way down against the wind I guess after rounding the north cape it'll be another 2 days down to the Bay of Islands instead of half a day...I'll keep you posted.

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Update

Just a quick update: our stay in Nelson has been good an effective. And most of all: social. We met up with Sean and his lovely family twice. What a cool and loving big family, I fell in love with them. Good thing they'll be heading off for their sailing season as well and we'll definitely see them out there again and we'll have a great time. And I'll take pix and videos of them sailing with my pro-camera and Charly.

We got grocery shopping done - thanks to them loaning us a car for a couple of hours.
We got the washing done, some repairs, change the clothes as we won't need winter clothes anymore AND, very important, my Mac Book is back alive, everything installed from scratch and it runs fine. Now I have to make a new back up, put my data back that I need and install the sounds back into my composing programm and finish setting up my E-Mail accounts. YAY!!! Back to my music and movies. Happy!

We're leaving tomorrow for the north. So weather timing is perfect. We'll be rounding Cape Reinga saturday morning, then go east for a couple of hours until rounding of north cape and then we have to cross our way down towards Bay of Islands where we take my friend on board next thursday. He comes with my windows laptop which he kindly updated as well. Good to go. Just need to install a couple more things and I am ready on that as well. Ah, amazing how those computers dictate our lives even if we're far away from everything.
I'll keep you posted from under way via radio transmitted e-mail.