Last night, after five days of glorious sailing and a day and a half of sheer hell, we arrived back in New Zealand with such a great welcome, we know why we've returned.
Our trip for the first five days has got to be some of the best sailing we've every experienced. Perfect conditions with flat seas, winds just forward of the beam which produced constant speeds of 7 knots, sunny skies and incredibly starry night and then....... the sting in the tail. The wind picked up to gale force and the seas the roughest we can remember. Poor old Calypso got continuously smacked in the side with huge waves breaking into the cockpit, making life aboard rather wet, cold, boisterous and somewhat unpleasant. Thank goodness that I'd cooked all those meals prior to departure.
We arrived back in Opua at three in the morning, tied up to the quarantine dock, dropped into our bed for only a couple of hours before the welcoming customs and biosecurity officials arrived to check us in. As we picked up a mooring buoy, dear Otto and Lilian, our buddies from Vagabond whom we'd left behind when we sailed off last June, arrived to welcome us back and invite us for dinner. So absolutely great to see them both again.
Once we've spent a couple of days cleaning up the poor bedrangled girl of salt and all those things disrupted by the passage, we'll start to plan our Kiwi activities in the hopes that we'll get to see some of the beautiful country this time around instead of the constant stream of boat repairs that dogged us last season.
