Believe it or not, our great New Zealand Adventure comes to an end in just 30 days, when Sophie points north and begins the 1,080 nautical mile return trip to Fiji.

It’s been 5 short months since we arrived in this wonderful country, and we’ve seen and experienced so much here. The last 2 months have been especially busy and have included visits from the Batterberrys and the Dannelly-McKennas, the celebration of Hazel’s 6th birthday on the Auckland waterfront, and our sitting through post-cyclone Lusi and her 50+ knot gusts while securely anchored at Great Barrier Island.

Jenna is sorting through 20,000 high resolution photos she has taken since January to assemble another awesome photo essay for all of you. In the meantime, what is the best way for us to celebrate having just one month left in Aotearoa?

ROAD TRIP! To the South Island and beyond.

The foundation of this trip is the car. One of the reasons why we bought our wonderful Kia Carnival minivan, pictured above, for NZ$5,500 (with a guaranteed “Cars for Cruisers” resale price of $3,500 when we depart the country on May 1st) was to enable us to go on an extended tour of New Zealand’s South Island.

So off we go.

Jenna threw an extraordinary amount of effort into planning our family road trip, and assembled the following itinerary:

Day 1: Matamata (Hobbiton tour, the film location for the Shire in “The Lord of the Rings” movies)
Day 2: Wellington (this country’s capital)
Day 3: Motueka (after taking the ferry to the South Island and exploring the north)
Day 4: Motueka (hiking in the Abel Tasman National Park)
Day 5: Kaikura (amazing coastal driving with spectacular ocean views)
Day 6: Christchurch (we were blown away by the 2011 earthquake devastation …)
Day 7: Christchurch (… and the next day we experienced our own 4.0 earthquake, the first earthquake ever for the kids!)
Day 8: Westport (hiking up abandoned rail lines on the West Coast)
Day 9: Hokitika (site of the big NZ gold rush and greenstone carving)
Day 10: Franz Josef (glacier snow, hiking)
Day 11: Franz Josef (more glacier snow, more hiking – Fox Glacier)
Day 12: Wanaka (Toy Museum, which for the kids means “YAY!, NO HIKES,” alpine drive)
Day 13: Queenstown (Jenna’s 32nd birthday)
Day 14: Queenstown (Luging, Shotover Jetboat)
Day 15: Te Anau Downs (Hiking)
Day 16: Milford Sound (Spectacular Views)
Day 17: Invercargill (Heated Swimming Pool, Albatross, Penguins)
Day 18: The Catlins (New Zealand Stuff, Penguins!)
Day 19: Dunedin (“Roast Meats and Malt Beer!”)
Day 20: Mount Cook (New Zealand’s Mount Rainier)
Day 21: Mount Cook (More Rainier, more hiking)
Day 22: TBD
Day 23: TBD (wineries?)
Day 24: Wellington (after the ferry North)
Day 25: Auckland (where we hold the BIG Goodbye celebration with lots of folks)
Day 26: BACK ON SOPHIE! (Yippee)

We are currently in Franz Josef at the YHA Backpackers and just walked to the glacier, which according to the schedule is the end of Day 10 after driving here from Hokitika.

It’s been a great trip so far, except for the fact that our Kia Carnival totally died on us between Abel Tasman and Kaikura on Day 5. As cheap NZ cars go, the Carnival has been good to us since we bought it in November. It has run every errand, including hauling all of us plus four Batterberrys on a 3 day mini-tour of the North Island in February. It’s done dozens of grocery and airport runs. It has a ton of room. It is a nice silver car.

As I mentioned in earlier posts, I have always wanted to own a minivan, and this Carnival has been doing a decent job at fulfilling all of my minivan dreams and fantasies.

Until the South Island.

Five days into our trip, and after a couple of days of hard driving over South Island mountain passes, the Carnival began to produce occasional engine knocking noises while going up steep grades. Then it started to occasionally stall in parking lots and at stop signs. We assumed (meaning we hoped) it was simply the situation of a car straining to go up the steep mountain slopes. Until the Carnival finally decided to actually, really overheat the next morning on the road back to Nelson on our journey across the island.

This overheat situation happened suddenly, and when it happened we immediately stopped by the side of the road. We popped the hood, I pulled the dipstick, and saw a jet of steam coming out of the dipstick hole, a jet of steam not unlike the jets of steam we saw on our traverse of Mount Doom a month earlier.

Not good. The jets of steam on Mount Doom are produced by magma near the surface of the earth. As far as I know, there is no magma deep inside the internals of a Korean minivan engine block.

Fortunately, we are members of AA, which is New Zealand’s equivalent of AAA but without the “American”, and within 30 minutes of our telephone call a flatbed towtruck with a beater Toyota on the back pulled up right ahead of us. The towtruck operator Paul could legally only carry 2 people in the cab with him, and he really didn’t like the idea of carrying additional passengers in a car attached to the back of his flatbed. So he brought a loaner car with him for us to use to follow him back into Richmond, the town near Nelson where his garage was located.

He rolled the loaner off his bed, he winched the Carnival up in its place, we hopped into the loaner, and followed him into town.

In case you were wondering, Richmond is the home of Sprig and Fern, the best brewery in New Zealand. They produce a helles lager that makes me feel like I am back in the Wiesn, and their ginger lager is forcing me to rethink many things in my life that I thought were already concluded.

Anyway, we get back to Paul’s Boutique garage, where he told us what I already knew and feared: we had blown the Kia Carnival’s head gasket. The repair would be between NZ$1,500 to NZ$4,000, and they couldn’t get it repaired for at least a week.

Among other things, this created a great teaching moment for Leo, because it presented his parents with the opportunity to demonstrate to him a practical application for ALL of the arithematic he was learning in school. The factors in our real-life math equation included:

• The potential cost of the repair
• The walkaway value of the head gasket-less Carnival (~NZ$500)
• The rental cost of a car during just the repair
• The rental cost of a car for the entire time we need to finish the road trip and return to Sophie (in the event we choose the gasket-less Carnival walk-away scenario)
• The NZ$3,500 we will get for a repaired Carnival on May 1 in Opua
• The potential hotel and holiday park cancellation fees if we choose to remain in Richmond and enjoy Sprig and Fern for a week while the Kia Carnival was being repaired (not an altogether unattractive scenario from my perspective, but Jenna had prepaid our lodging fees for a number of the 18 remaining nights on our trip, and cancellations would potentially result in a not-insignificant cost)
• The cost of the emotional pain and suffering we would incur resulting from a decision to not continue our awesome road trip.

(Btw, Jan Gray, if you are reading this and are willing to accept a challenge, I will give you a Sprig and Fern T-shirt in exchange for your posting, in the comments section of this blog, the mathematical equation that documents and helps us prove the solution to this problem.)

Jenna and I are both from Massachusetts and can occasionally be wicked smart, so we thought about this for about two minutes (and of course discussed it with each other in a caring, open, non-stressful, nurturing, and empathetic way) and decided to rent an equivalent beater minivan for NZ$55-NZ$69 per day (depending on the length of the rental.) For us it was more important to continue with the road trip. The fact that I could purchase Sprig and Fern lager throughout the South Island (which I learned during our 2 minute discussion) had absolutely nothing to do with the outcome of this shared decision.

Meanwhile Leo — who had been begging us to take him to a McDonalds or a Burger King at least once in his entire lifetime — pointed out that there was a Burger King next door to the repair shop. It was noon, we were hungry, and we had 40 minutes to kill before Warwick from the beater minivan rental agency would come to pick me up so I could get our replacement car. We (I) had also promised Leo that at some point on this road trip we would go to a fast food joint.

I must confess that I personally have not patronized a McDonalds or a Burger King since a late night-delayed flight-layover in Minneapolis with Tami Reller and Darren Laybourn on our way to Fargo, North Dakota. That was probably ten years ago. Jenna can’t remember the last time she ate this type of food at one of these places.

But a promise to Leo is a promise, so we went up to the Burger King, ordered our food, and ate it. It was horrible. That’s not just the parents’ view, even the kids thought it was horrible.

Warwick eventually showed up to accompany me to our new rental beater minivan, and Jenna stayed behind in the Burger King with Leo and Hazel and took advantage of the opportunity to have a teaching moment with the kids, laying out for them the bad things that bad food can do to your bodies.

They apparently believed. Hazel has been lecturing us on the importance of eating salads and avoiding fats ever since. Score one for H!

Meanwhile, I got the replacement minivan. The new ride is a Toyota Enima, and it is sweet!

Oh, in my discussion of the blown head gasket in the mountain passes, I may have forgotten to mention the amount of stuff we are hauling with us: 4 bikes, 4 clothing duffle bags, 4 backpacks, 1 food box, 1 food bag, 4 other duffle bags, 1 bike helmet bag, 1 Yeti cooler (thank you forever, Steven Fell!), 4 towels, and 1 laundry bag. I am certain this gear had nothing to do with the strain on the Kia Carnival’s engine as we climbed 8% mountain grades, and we are thankful that the Enima can hold all of this gear.

We were also surprised to learn that New Zealand is a dumping ground for used cars from Japan, which apparently has strict insurance requirements for cars that are 7+ years old. It makes sense for used Japanese cars to come here, since new cars in New Zealand are very expensive and both countries have a drive-on-the-left infrastructure. Our Enima is definitely from Japan, which means the FM radio only goes up to 88.0 and many of the buttons on the instrument panel have labels written in Japanese.

But the new set of wheels handle the New Zealand South Island mountain passes and coastal straightaways with ease. This photo above is similar to one I took for the blog 15 months ago in Texas when we crossed the USA in our BMW X5, except this time the gauge displays 100+ KPH as opposed to 100+ MPH. Same idea, though. I am not sure if the “Keep Left” sticker is there to remind tourist drivers of New Zealand’s primary road rule or to prevent them from dwelling on the fact that their beater rental minivan has 220,000 KM under its belt.

In the good news department, we learned today that the repair shop in Richmond (did I mention that Richmond is the home of Sprig and Fern, the best beer in New Zealand?) now thinks that the problem with the Kia Carnival may not involve the entire head gasket but simply a single cylinder. This will hopefully contribute towards a lower repair cost.

Regardless, our road trip will continue. We left Sophie on a dock in Opua, where we are having some final repairs done in our absence, including the installation of the correct diesel heater parts and the completion of our 230v inverter swapout. We will also have the folks there install a propane line that runs to our transom, so we can mount a permanent gas barbecue on our stern rail to more easily cook all of the fish we plan to catch upon our return to the tropics.

In a few short weeks we will be back onboard our beloved Sophie, and we will sail her 60 miles south to Whangerei to haul her out of the water for a week and have her bottom painted. We plan to use the week she is out of the water to reintroduce our children to structured Sophie School while also provisioning the boat with all of the things that you can buy here in New Zealand that you can’t buy in the tropics. (Mainly lamb and NZ$11/bottle pinot noir.)

Then we will be joined by our Seattle friends Ravi and Alison, who haven’t done any offshore sailing but are adventurous souls who quit their comfortable jobs in America to spend a year backpacking the world.

We will also be joined by DAN ROGERS! He is the Best Man from our wedding, the person who shares a birthday with Leo, the person who taught me how to fish, and the person who helped us guide Sophie from San Diego to the Marquesas. He caught what I now realize is a really big trevally, pictured above, when he was with us in the Marquesas.

The seven on us will depart New Zealand on Sophie on May 1 (weather permitting) and head for Fiji. Since the prevailing winds down here tend to blow from the southwest, it is theoretically easier to head north than it is to head south in this part of the world. We hope to do the passage less than a week, similar to the amount of time it took us to head south to New Zealand last November. We also plan to take advantage of Sophie’s motoring range and will be quite happy to exchange diesel fuel for safety in order to get up to the tropics more quickly.

Waiting for us in Fiji will be our friends Ian and Becky, you know, the couple who became famous for being hooked on fishing. And they are bringing with them a brand new Relaxation Station — a floating inflatable conversation pit —  which we hope will become Sophie’s own portable version of the former Fiji surf resort “Cloud Nine“.

Let the (Southern hemisphere) winter begin!

Have I mentioned lately how lucky we are?

This week marks the one year anniversary of the day Jenna, Leo, Hazel and I  — along with the capable support of my brother Rich and our friend Dan — left San Diego to begin our Pacific crossing. It’s been a crazy and amazing and wonderful year for us on Sophie, and here are some of the things we are currently thinking about as we mark this milestone.

I Love Lusi
 
Sophie is currently anchored in Kaiarara Bay on Great Barrier Island, riding out the remnants of ex-cyclone “Lusi” as it travels down the New Zealand coast throughout the day. We’ve had gusts up to 55 knots today, and the weather forecast calls for continuing strong winds through tomorrow. But we feel pretty safe right now. We are in a relatively sheltered anchorage and have 90 meters of heavy chain and a big anchor holding us fast to a muddy bottom. There is one other boat anchored with us in the bay, so we don’t have to worry too much about someone else breaking loose and hitting us. We also have been tracking our position on the chart since we set the anchor yesterday afternoon, and we haven’t budged the anchor an inch since we set it.

We like to tell the kids that there are 5 core rules about life on Sophie:

1. Safety
2. Safety
3. Safety
4. Safety
5. Safety

Sometimes when we are entertaining guests or playing on beaches, we can lose sight of the fact that doing a family circumnavigation on a sailboat can be a dangerous business. Days like today are a good reminder that we always need to be following the 5 rules. We feel pretty safe right now: we spent time in town talking to locals about conditions on Great Barrier during storms, we picked our anchorage based on the forecasted wind direction, we have a large amount of chain out with a second anchor ready to be dropped in seconds, we stripped cushions and other things that could break in the wind from the outside of the boat, we are tracking our position on electronic charts, we are listening to the radio (lot’s of boats dragging in other nearby harbors), and we are keeping watches.

Over the last year we’ve tried to be safe, and other than a couple of fish or hook-induced cuts we’ve had no major accidents. We reef early and often, we tether in when offshore, and we try to be conservative in our planning. We’re thankful that we’ve had some good luck, but we’ll continue to live by the 5 rules.

Role Models

When Jenna and I planned this trip, we implicitly just knew that we would approach it from the perspective of being equals who shared all of the work that fills your day on a circumnavigation with kids: cooking, cleaning, boat repairs, maintenance, home schooling, keeping watch, navigating, anchoring, planning, etc. We were also well aware that each of us we coming into this adventure with different skillsets and perspectives. I had more sailing and boat repair experience than Jenna, who rarely gives herself enough credit for “only” having 10 years sailing experience heading into this trip. On the other hand, before we left Jenna threw herself into planning for how we were going to homeschool Leo and Hazel for the next 5 years. And I am not sure going into this trip if either of us fully anticipated how much effort homeschooling was going to require, although I bet she had a much better sense for what was in store for us than I did.

So for the first year, we each “took a kid” for home schooling and then divided up the rest of the work on a relatively informal, ad hoc basis. As a system it worked reasonably well for the first year, but Jenna kept thinking we weren’t doing enough to educate the kids and I kept thinking that we weren’t doing enough to maintain the boat. And please don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to create the impression that Jenna doesn’t like doing “the boat stuff”, because she most certainly does. But in the last couple of weeks, we switched to a model where Jenna manages homeschooling for both Leo and Hazel at the same time, and during that time I focus on boat projects. Jenna is a wonderful, empathetic and patient teacher with the kids — that’s not just my view but the view of friends who have been with us during the last month and have watched her in action. When I was teaching Leo, I would hand him his spelling book, say “do this assignment” and then try to sneak away to fix a toilet. Jenna actually teaches him.

We’ll see how this new model works out. The kids seem to like it more, and the boat is definitely looking better. Most importantly, we both get to gravitate towards roles that we really enjoy doing while still maintaining the spirit of sharing that we had when we started the trip.

Another way to think about this is to simply say that Jenna is a much, much better teacher than I am.

Friends Are a Great Source for Stories

A few weeks ago, we hiked the famous Tongariro Alpine Crossing with two other couples, our Seattle friends Troy and Maureen and my college friends James and Maureen. The hike is a 20 km trek across a barren alpine landscape that includes some mountains that were used for scenes in the Lord of the Rings movies.

As day hikes go, this is a loooong hike. We left our kids along with Troy and Maureen’s kids with a sitter for the day. It was going to be a grownups-only trip, which was a welcome relief for those of us who wind up carrying kids for long distances on day hikes.

Anyway, Troy and Maureen are both runners and set off on a much faster pace than the rest of us. They were soon long gone in the distance. We ran into them again at mid-day returning from an optional side trail to a scenic outlook summit just as we were beginning to ascend it. I realized that they could be done with the trek hours before the rest of us, so I gave Troy the keys to our minivan so they wouldn’t have to sit around in the parking lot waiting for us.

We hiked for another 5 hours, traversing across some spectacular countryside. (Jenna is working on a post with lots of photos.) But we were getting tired. When we were an hour from our destination, I said to James “You know, I bet Troy and Maureen finished their hike an hour ago and drove back into town. Maureen picked up the kids and is watching them, while Troy went to a store, bought some cold beer, and is waiting for us in the parking lot.”

James looked back at me and replied “You know, Jamie, I really enjoy this fantasy world that you sometimes inhabit. But there is simply no way that is going to happen.”

When we got to the parking lot, there was Troy standing there with his hands on his hips and a big smile on his face. Maureen was in town watching the kids, and there was a 12 pack of beer sitting on ice in the back of the minivan.

Score one for Troy!

We love our friends and family, and they are a great source for stories on this trip: Rich and Dan, Max and Becca, the Riebelings, the Fells, Randy and Susan, Troy and Maureen (trip 1), Frank and Fred, Ian and Becky, Troy and Maureen (trip 2) with their kids, then James and Maureen. These are just the folks who traveled halfway around the world to join us over the course of the last year.

We’ve also reconnected and made new friends in Auckland, Opua, Fiji, Tonga, and of course, with the members of the Swedish Navy. They all have good stories to tell!

The Fells in particular did something especially cool: they pulled together a book containing photos from their Tonga visit and along with our years of cruising together in Seattle before we left.

If you ever have the chance to visit Sophie, you’ll have to check it out. It’s amazing.

Keeping Connections Back Home is Easier Than I Thought

In addition to the monthly visitors/spare-parts-mules who have flown out to stay with us, we’ve had good Internet connections in Fiji and New Zealand over the last 7 months, making connections back home easier than I thought they would be. I find myself using Facebook more now than when I lived in the US. I am hanging out on baseball websites more now than back when I was working. (I did used to work, you know, and I worked pretty hard.) We Skype with friends and grandparents. Even though we are far away, we don’t feel remote.

You Can Buy Food Anywhere

I’ve mentioned this before in the blog, but it’s true. It’s really true! You can buy food anywhere!

Here is a shot of our salon fridge. (Jenna wished I had reorganized it before taking a photo for the blog, but that will have to wait for the next school day.) It contains meat, cheese, milk, eggs, veggies, syrup, dips, hummus, jam, sauces, spices, and spreads. It looks pretty much the same way it has looked since San Diego.

I popped into the small Port Fitzroy general store with Hazel and Leo yesterday to do some last minute provisioning before the storm. As we walked in, Hazel asked “Dad, can we get some marshmallows for our camping party that we are planning with Mom?”

“No,” I responded, “they don’t have any here.”

The lady behind the counter looked up and said “Yes we do, they are right over there on that shelf.”

You can buy food anywhere.

Sophie is Simply a Collection of Systems

The boat seems much simpler now than it did a year ago. We haven’t added any significant new equipment, and we have reorganized where we put things so our storage system seems more sensible for us.

But what contributes most to this sense of simplicity is the growing understanding that the boat is merely a collection of systems, systems that we have debugged and rebuilt over the course of the last year and a half. Sails, engines, AC, DC, watermaker, toilets, genset, nav, stereo/AV, propane. That’s pretty much it.

This view makes it easier for us to figure out when something is wrong, how to most easily isolate the problem, and how to best go ahead with a repair. It’s one thing to assume that you are going to know the boat much better after you live on it for a while, but it’s another thing to actually do so.

In other words, a toilet repair that used to take me 4 hours to debug and fix now takes 20 minutes. That’s progress!

There are ALWAYS Bigger Fish

We ran into this group of fishermen weighing their catch just around the corner from us at the Port Fitzroy pier this week as we were heading up to the Boat Club for their Wednesday Pizza Night. It’s a 105 kilo striped marlin caught in local waters.

There is absolutely no reason why we can’t land a marlin this size on Sophie.

I will.

24 x 7 x 78

We have been living with Leo and Hazel all day, every day for about 78 weeks since we left Seattle. That’s a long time and is EASILY the best part of this trip for me and Jenna. When we left, Hazel couldn’t read. She now has Alice in Wonderland and The Hobbit on her Kindle. Leo is growing up in so many different ways in front of us every day. From an age perspective he is halfway out the door to college. But that’s OK because we get to hang out with him all of the time.

Leo and Hazel have become great friends with each other, they bicker with each other, they basically do almost everything with each other. We get to see it all, and it’s all good because I feel overall that they are building a connection with me and Jenna that will last long after this trip is done and people have stopped reading this blog.

Have I told you lately how lucky we are?

Jenna and I drove out to the Auckland International Airport last night to pick up our friend Maureen and her kids Cole and Cora. They flew 20 hours from Seattle in order to join us for a vacation on Sophie in New Zealand.

With this airport pickup, the 2014 season of “Sophie Adventure Cruises” has begun.

Readers of this blog know that for me and Jenna, one of the best things in our life these days are the times when we can host friends and family from back home on our cruise around the world. We jokingly refer to this as “Sophie Adventure Cruises” because for our guests it’s like going on an exotic luxury vacation, and for us it’s an opportunity to throw lots of energy into swimming, fishing, exploring, cooking, drinking, dancing, and celebrating the overall sense of joy in our lives on the water with the people we love.

2014 is filling up fast! We plan to remain in New Zealand through the end of April. Maureen and kids will be joined by her husband Troy at the end of the week and will cruise with us off and on through the end of this month. Troy and Maureen joined us sans kids in Fiji in September, making them our first repeat couple on the cruise! My college friends James and Maureen will then join us in the first week in March for a week, and Seattle friends Ravi and Alison will cruise on Sophie later that month.

Towards the end of April, Dan (the famous tattoo dude from our crossing to the Marquesas) will fly to New Zealand and help us sail Sophie the 1,000 miles back up to Fiji. We’ll be greeted there in May by Ian and Becky, who had so much fun getting hooked in the Bay of Islands that they are coming back for more punishment, this time in an area with much warmer water.

Later on in May I will fly to Boston to attend my son Max’s graduation from law school, and Max will return with me to spend the month of June studying for the bar exam while watching every World Cup soccer match from various backpacker beachfront bars throughout western Fiji. Later on in June, we will be joined by Jenna’s sister Julie and her husband Silas for a couple of weeks. Julie and Max spent a summer working together in a boat cleaning business back at Elliot Bay Marina in Seattle, and even though they are now (or soon will be) respectively a physician and an attorney, Jenna and I both hope they have not walked away from their past and still remember how to properly apply wax to fiberglass and metal polish to stainless steel.

In July, we will all fly back to the United States to reconnect with friends and family in Seattle, New England, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. There will be a family wedding in Maine as part of the trip. For Jenna and the kids, it will be their first visit back to the US since we left San Diego almost a year ago.

In August it’s back to Fiji, and our Seattle friends Mark and Cathy will join us for a week or two. In September, my daughter Sara and her friend Julie will join us and we will finally resume our westward journey and head to Vanuatu and it’s volcanoes. From there we are thinking we’ll head to the Solomon Islands and then to Indonesia. We are not sure how much time we will spend in Papua New Guinea on the way. But that is over a half a year out, and if there is one thing we’ve learned from cruising so far, it’s that plans rarely remain firm when they are a half a year away.

Except, of course, when it involves family and friends traveling halfway around the world to join us.

That pretty much summaries our thinking of how we plan to spend our next year. There is some talk of Jenna organizing a “Girl’s Week” in Bali. We also hope that more folks from back home take advantage of the few remaining slots in our calendar in 2014 and join us. But overall we have a pretty good sense of where we are going, and who will be joining us.

In terms of last night, all four of us get pretty excited when our visitors are about to arrive.

For starters, it gives us an excuse to clean up Sophie, both on the outside (here is a shot of Sophie back at Auckland’s Viaduct Marina)…

… and on the inside.

Most of our guests stay in “The Yellow Room” — formerly “Julie’s Room”, “Holly’s Room”, “Sara’s Room”, then “Richy’s Room”, then “Max and Becca’s Room” etc. — the list of names of that room has turned into an honor role of guests that goes back to the beginning of Sophie.

And the aura of that room continues to grow, because in the process of cleaning it this week I discovered a Victoria’s Secret black bra — size 36 C — lodged underneath one of the drawers at the foot of the bed. It was right next to a kid’s swim diaper. Every woman who has slept in that room since we left Seattle in September 2012 denies ownership of the bra. For all we know it may have been there for years. We used to have some pretty fun times hosting friends on Sophie for the Thursday night “Downtown Sailing Series” races back in Seattle, but Jenna and I never realized some of our crew had that much fun.

So if you happen to have spent some time on Sophie and inadvertently misplaced this bra, please let me and Jenna know. We will handle all inquiries with the appropriate level of discretion.

Leo got into the cleaning act and actually cleaned his room because he will be sharing it with Cole for the next week.

However, in order to protect his stuff he built a Lego security keypad, which he mounted on the wall.

He also posted the appropriate warnings on his door, for safety purposes of course.

Not all of the preparation we do in advance of visits is skin deep. I spent 5 hours troubleshooting the lighting in Maureen’s Room (formerly “The Yellow Room”) because the darn lights wouldn’t go on. I assumed that since the French builders used an orange (meaning protected) cable, there was a hidden fuse somewhere behind the walls. There wasn’t, it was a bad connection on the switch by the bed, a switch I had completely forgotten about. But it’s fixed, and that’s what counts.

I also usually have to clean out all of the filters in the head (bathroom) sump pumps, which in Hazel’s case involved extricating a cocktail of ponytail rubber bands, necklace beads, and glittery hair from the spot where the drainage hose enters the sump pump filter. In other words, another hour or two of bilge yoga, just to make the sinks work.

This is a photo of the sump pump with the filter below it. The hose going into the filter is not attached, due to the need to remove the aforementioned cocktail.

But there is a quid pro quo involved in our hosting friends and family from back home, because they usually carry with them A LOT of stuff that we need. In Maureen’s case, she carried two duffle bags weighing 100 pounds in total — in addition to her own luggage, two young children and their respective car seats — on her flights halfway around the world.

For Sophie and her crew it was a nice hall. Christmas presents, school books, spare parts, cleaning supplies, and stuff you just can’t easily get in New Zealand.

For example, it turns out that it is quite difficult to find Mr. Clean Magic Eraser pads in New Zealand, and these things are worth their weight in gold in terms of their ability to easily remove stains and moldy spots from fiberglass and rub rails.

But the TSA must have wondered why Maureen was carrying 30 of them in her luggage, because 4 of them had been neatly been torn in half, I assume during their physical inspection of her duffel bags.

Nothing but solid Mr. Clean Magic Eraser magic here.

Jenna and I also want to make sure that we have the right equipment on board to maximize the “Sophie Adventure Cruises” experience for our guests, and we have made two significant additions in this department in advance of the 2014 season.

For starters, Jenna and I bought each other folding, full-sized mountain bikes for Christmas. I hauled them back from the U.S. last week. They claim to be made with something called “Military Technology”, but they seem reliable and are much faster than the small-wheeled folding bikes we had ten years ago.

They fit nicely under the hatches in each of Sophie’s engine compartments.

Jenna can easily lift them off the boat and onto the dock.

And from there they easily snap together and are ready to go. We’ve only had them for a week, and that have already helped us immeasurably in dealing with the logistics of provisioning and getting from point A to point B.

We hope that our friends and family will enjoy using them to easily explore different spots along the way of our journey.

Our second big addition for 2014? Dinghy Wheels!

These babies could have come straight off of a Boeing!

I bought them on the spur of the moment at a West Marine in Seattle two weeks ago, and they are simply awesome. We have a heavy dinghy, and we often visit beaches with a gradual slope, significant tides, or big surf. Jenna and I could barely move the dinghy by ourselves, and this eventually limited which beaches we could visit and when we could visit them. But with the new wheels, I can easily move the dinghy by myself up and down 100 feet of beach with no problem at all.

We put it to good use today (and nice photo bomb there, Leo).

But the best thing about hosting friends and family from back home isn’t having a clean boat, it isn’t the receiving of loot from back home, and it isn’t the ability to play with new types of water toys. For us, the best thing about these visits is the ability to simply go out sailing with people we love, and then anchor in a quiet harbor and play in the water.

That’s what we did today with Maureen and the kids. Cora and Cole hadn’t been on Sophie for over a year and a half, but they felt right at home when they got on board last night. It was well after midnight, and they had been on planes for practically a day.

They seem right at home.

Maureen has been sailing on Sophie pretty much since we got her six years ago, and it was great seeing her and Jenna work the foredeck together as we once again sailed away from Auckland on a day with weather MUCH NICER than the snow they were getting back home in Seattle.

We had a nice broad reach for about 13 miles out to Waiheke Island and enjoyed the opportunity to use our favorite sail.

On the way we made sure we took the time to admire some of the local Kiwi lovelies.

As soon as we were anchored at Waiheke, we dropped our newly-wheeled dinghy into the water and headed to the beach. The kids loved the opportunity to play with their boogie boards…

… especially when they conned one of the grown-ups to play speedboat and pull them along the water’s edge so they could skim at a high speed. This was done over very short distances.

By the time we got back to the boat, it was 6:30 PM. We made a quick dinner (curried chicken, rice, kale, green beans, apples, pinot noir). The younger kids crashed relatively quickly. Leo stayed up and played UNO with Jenna and Maureen while I wrote this blog.

It was a long day, but we collected our friends, got out of the city and made it to a nice anchorage. We even had a bright rainbow followed by a nice sunset. Tomorrow we’ll head 50 miles around to the other side of the Coromandel Peninsula and hang out on the beaches of Great Mercury Island. These are beaches we love, and we are with people we love.

Have I mentioned lately how lucky we are?

Jenna and I attended the annual Boxing Day horse races at Ellerslie track in Auckland yesterday, and we had an absolute blast. Leo kept referring to the event as the Boxer Day races, but it was more about horse racing than men’s underwear. We actually had a babysitter for the kids and spent the entire day in an outdoor summer Christmas party. What could be better?

For starters, it gave us a chance to dress up, something that we have done exactly once so far on the cruise.

I went with the same ensemble that won me the best-dressed male at the Opua School fundraising tea, except I swapped out the skinny gray tie for a wider silver checked tie from Barney’s. I also wore cufflinks fashioned from 5 cent kiwi coins that our host Misti gave me for Christmas earlier in the week. Jenna wore the coral dress she wore for my 50th birthday party along with vintage white gloves that were a gift from Becky and some Prada platform wedge stompers.

We all liked the way her shoes complemented her ray tattoo.

We attended with our friends Scott and Annie, and Nigel and Misti. We actually had tickets to a lounge area that featured a series of fashion contests throughout the afternoon in between the horse races.

We arrived too late to register for the competition, and which was a shame because I think my skinny jeans would have put up a decent fight in the men’s group.

But we were really there for the ponies, and we would sit around our table and diligently go through the data on each horse and then bet on the one with the coolest name. Jenna was especially good at that. It was the gloves.

We would then go outside and sit on a balcony to watch the race. We had never been to a horse race before.

The races were run on grass and varied in distance.

It was SO MUCH FUN. Here is what I looked like after my horse Abideswithme won his race.

Any horse with a name that refers to The Big Lebowski requires a bet, and I had him to win and to place.

Jenna got into the winnings as well. She liked it.

But as much as we were enjoying the horse racing, the more we were there, the more we realized that the day was all about the clothes. In the women’s fashion contests, the successful strategy was to go vertical.

Those aren’t hats on their heads, by the way. They are called fascinators. Some were pretty elaborate.

We are obviously a long way from Tonga.

We’ve written in these pages about our good friend Randy Daniels from Seattle. He has developed a brilliant habit of posing with interesting-looking people at parties around the world. I decided to channel Randy’s spirit and do the same. Here is a shot of me with the model who posed for the event poster at the top of this blog. She didn’t enter any of the contests, but her dress was stunning.

Here is a shot of me with Paris Hilton and her friend.

Even Jenna got into the action and posed with a couple of guys whe had entered the best-dressed contest.  The guy on the right is named James and was really bummed he didn’t win. He had a nice cane, though.

All in all it was a day of silly fun, capped off with Jenna’s Minnie Driver imitation from “Good Will Hunting” She won the overall competition for best dressed at the event. At least in my view she did.

Have I mentioned how lucky we are to be on this trip?

We’ve had Sophie docked in Auckland’s central Viaduct Marina for the last few days. It’s a lovely location, and the boat is looking great. We also are enjoying our new privacy screens, because tourists seem to be stopping by every few minutes and taking our photo. We can see them, but they can’t see us.

We are also enjoying our proximity to Auckland’s Central Business District, and we get to park our minivan right next to the boat.

Sophie has made some new and big friends in our marina.

Some are even too big to fit into a single photo using the camera that Jenna lets me use.

That is indeed a private yacht. (In the back.)

But I digress.

Throughout millennia, whenever a particular harbor becomes a popular destination for ships from far away, various “support industries” spring up to support the needs of the sailors onboard, usually men whose pockets are filled with cash and whose hearts are filled with loneliness. These business are usually found in seedy neighborhoods where men go without telling their wives to drink and then spend all of their money in the pursuit of pleasure.

I discovered on a walk today that Auckland is no different.

I was a few blocks away from Sophie, heading towards a park, when I stumbled into this sidewalk sign.

I was immediately tempted to go in and spend all of my money. But it’s Christmas Eve, I am made of stronger stuff, and passed by the sign.  But then I turned the corner and immediately saw this:

And then this:

… and this

… and this

and this …

and this …

and this …

and this …

… all on the same block!

I turned the next corner, and there was more.

Like this

… and this

… and this

… and this

And then it dawned me!

We’ve now spent 4 days in Auckland walking through the central downtown area, and I realized that I had not see a single marine, diving, or fishing store in the entire city. Auckland is the commercial center of New Zealand, and boating is a foundation for the way of life here. What was going on?

Auckland, just like Amsterdam and other forward-thinking global cities, had decided that the best way to deal with modern social issues like marine and fishing addiction was to concentrate it in a single targeted geographic area within the city. That way it is easier to manage the behavior while at the same time keeping the rest of the city clean and free of vice.

It’s brilliant urban planning when done properly, and in Auckland it appears to be working.

The more I walked, the more I saw how Auckland is just like Amsterdam. Some businesses in the red light district here advertise their wares in storefront windows.

And others practice their craft out in the open in the middle of the street in broad daylight!

There are marine ATMs nearby so patrons don’t have to leave the district to get cash.

Even the public health service gets involved.

Throughout the entire district, it was impossible to avoid the quiet-yet-persistent sidewalk solicitations. They knew why you were there. It was all above board but unlike anything I’ve seen anywhere else in the world.

Even after a while it was still difficult for me to grasp the scale and depth of the activity and services offered here.

Some of the businesses even looked like they were managed by people hailing from Massachusetts, where Jenna and I both grew up.

Concentrated business districts like this one apparently can attract entrepreneurs from around the world.

But regardless of where they come from, the sailors red light district here in Auckland is a source of considerable civic pride. They have built something unique and great here.

I clearly need to spend more time walking the blocks in this neighborhood — with an appropriate level of restraint — marveling about what is taking place here in this special corner of the world.

Merry Christmas, everyone!

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas summer! Today is the longest day of the year and official start of summer here in New Zealand.

It’s a little surreal for us that Seattle has a snow day while Leo and Hazel are sporting their togs and jandals, slathering on sunblock, and chanting “4 days to Christmas.” We’re going Kiwi-style! For the first time we will celebrate Christmas with just the 4 of us on the boat, and Sophie is ready.

The lights are LEDs of course. Inside, we have a cute little tree.
We only brought four ornaments with us, but ended up getting a few more to avoid looking like a Charlie Brown tree.

The kids have had so much fun at Opua School and made lots of holiday projects. They are quite proud of their calendars.

There is a Christmas Parade in Pahia and this year’s theme was fairy tales. Opua students could come as their favorite fairy tale character or their school uniform. Remember the one when Batgirl helps Cinderella find some lost forest friends? We do.

Leo donned his school uniform instead.

The Peter Pan float from Pahia Elementary was the most elaborate and won first prize.

Opua School had a small storybook float and most of the kids walked in front.

The little pig faces in the window were the cutest.

No Christmas parade is complete without some Maori cheer.

And of course Santa.

Apparently the real Santa is already on his way here.  According to Hazel it takes 17 days for reindeer to fly to New Zealand from the North Pole so the sleigh is en route. Here is her letter to him:

After the parade, the kids ate ice cream and went on the car ride. Leo kept hitting cones. After three warnings, he was banned from the ride. Best time ever.

One of our favorite sights are the Pohutukawa, or New Zealand Christmas tree. They were plain green when we arrived, but in the last few weeks have burst into bloom.

The path in Whangarei was red from so many petals on the ground.

We’ve also done some holiday baking. Leo and Hazel’s friends Bailey and Boston joined us on Sophie for a pizza party, cookie decorating, movie night and sleepover. Holly, you missed out on Home Alone. The gingerbread cookies turned out way better than I expected, and were pretty easy to decorate.

The kids did the ones around the outside, and I did the ones on the board.

In addition, we decided to make a gingerbread house, our first one from scratch. Hey, we’re on a boat and not working so if we don’t do this now, when would we? I found a recipe online, designed a paper pattern, and made three batches of dough.

Trimming the pieces a second time right after they came out of the oven worked great and made the house fit almost perfectly together. Royal icing took care of the rest. The kids decorated most of the house and garden and then our good friend Heidi helped with some of the finishing touches.

Here’s the completed house:

The gingerbread house didn’t last long. The kids brought it to school on their last day before summer vacation and it vanished within minutes.

Over the last couple days we’ve sailed from the Bay of Islands south to Auckland where we’ll spend the holidays. As I type, Jamie is playing Christmas music for the kids who are bouncing on the trampolines and getting soaked in the spray kicking up in 25 knots of wind right outside of Auckland.

Here is Hazel, post trampoline:

We’re excited to explore a new part of New Zealand and looking forward to having Christmas dins at our friend Misti’s house and then dressing up for the horse races on Boxing Day. We wish all of you a very Merry Christmas and a happy holiday season!

Here is a quick update on the final bits and pieces on our Opua refit.

Code Zero (one of our sails)
For starters, the local riggers at Northland fabricated a new mount for our bowsprit and then mounted the new bowsprit that Troy and Maureen hand-carried to Fiji last August. We use this bowsprit to attach the bottom of the code zero to the boat.The mount consists of a flat stainless steel plate attached to a fabricated piece of black nylon with a curve that matches the curve of the cross beam. I think this is a better design than the original.

We also spent some time with Roger Hall from the local North Sails loft trying to figure out the best way to rig the sail permanently. The answer had been sitting right in front of us for the last 5 years!

We are going to run the continuous furler line sideways to one of our spinnaker guy snatch blocks on the starboard bow, and from there to the bow cleat. It gives us the perfect angle to keep tension on the line as we unfurl and furl the sail. We also have reconfigured how we run the line through the furler, using the correct set of line entrances and exits this time. We think this approach will eliminate all of the tangle problems we’ve had with the sail since we commissioned Sophie. We also decided that we don’t really need sun protection on the sail if we leave it out for a couple of days at a time during a passage and then put it away when we are in port. We’ll try this approach as we sail down to Auckland between now and Saturday.

The stopper block that holds the code zero halyard has not been working well, so we are going to replace it with a new stopper to make sure we have as much tension on the halyard as possible. This block has been giving us trouble since our Marquesas crossing.

Luckily, we have a spare.

Jib
We replaced our jib sheets. Too much chafe. Same color, size and material.

(And those of you with keen eyes just noticed Sophie’s Christmas lights in this photo. Yes, we are fully decorated, and yes, Jenna’s holiday photo bog essay is on the way …)

Heater

Our heater works! That’s the beautiful sight of diesel exhaust coming out of the heater exhaust vent.

It was fairly straightforward for the local sparkie to install the new heater. He had to install a new diesel return line to the tank.

He also installed a new fuel-water separator to help us avoid water damage in the future.

Unfortunately, the new heater’s combustion chamber did not match the fittings for our old unit, so I have to carry that part back with me when I return to Seattle for some stuff in late January. I don’t think I will disguise it as a pink purse, though. They also may not allow me to hand carry it onto the plane, given its shape and its warning label.

But we understand that April autumn mornings can be quite cold in Opua, and we are very happy about this repair.

Watermaker
We had the rebuilt ETD and the rebuilt (and repainted) Cat Power pump installed. Here’s the pump.

We still have to bleed some air out of the lines, but I assume that this will all be working tomorrow.

Leaks
We had the guys from a local boatbuilder dig out the sealant cracks around the salon panoramic windows.

They then resealed the holes using the same material that Lagoon originally used.

Jenna and I then sprayed a jet of water at the repair area for 5 minutes, and not a single drop of water crept into Sophie. I think we fixed this one. A dry boat is a happy boat.

Music
Sophie has a 4 zone stereo system (salon, aft cockpit, fly bridge, forward cockpit) that stopped working during our Pacific crossing. Too much salt and wave action were the likely culprits. In hindsight, this created a great deal of stress for us because it turns out that music is quite important to our lives. We wound up using a little, battery powered speaker attached to a phone for most of the summer, and it’s just doesn’t create the same ambience we used to enjoy when 40 people danced on Sophie’s decks during the Thursday night races back in Seattle.

Well, our stereo system is back in action and better than ever. I took apart all of the cabling, cleaned the connections, and then reassembled all of the leads going into the system’s main amplifier.

The speakers in the forward cockpit (also occasionally known as the makeout cockpit because it is a cozy spot for couples) were basically trashed.

It turns out that extended exposure to green water shortens the lifespan of stereo speakers. We’ve now replaced the speakers with new ones and they sound great. We are looking forward to having Troy and Maureen give us feedback on the space’s ambience when they return for a visit in February.

Aft Cockpit Enclosure
We had new sunscreens made here in Opua, and they are wonderful. We may wind up leaving them permanently installed for the next four years. The local canvas shop used the existing winter enclosure as a template, so the new screens map directly to the existing cockpit hardware.

You get a really nice view from the shaded interior.

But from the outside, people can’t really see in, giving us a certain degree of privacy.

We will be docked in Auckland’s Viaduct Marina over the next couple of weeks, and we understand that this is a popular spot where thousands of people walk the docks during the holidays. It will be nice to be able to watch them without having them watch us.

Getting Ready for a Busy Year
It now looks like we will be having friends and family visit us in February, March, May, June, August, and September. We love the company and the opportunity to share our boat and our lives with people who are close to us. With all of the additions and repairs we’ve made here in Opua, Sophie will be ready and waiting!

Believe it or not, it’s coming up on 6 years since we first received Sophie in a shiny new package from the Lagoon factory in Bordeaux, France. Actually, she didn’t come in a shiny new package, she came covered in soot on the deck of a freighter from Belgium. But she was new, she was ours, and she arrived the same week as Hazel.

Since then we sailed Sophie for 5 happy years in the Pacific Northwest, and after that sailed her 7,000 offshore miles from Seattle to New Zealand on the first leg of our family adventure. Over the course of our Pacific crossing we encountered in aggregate about a week and a half of heavy weather sailing involving 30+ knots of wind and 5+ meter seas.

We have met friends on other boats who did the Pacific crossing over the last year and lost things like their mast, rudder, sail drive, autopilot, self steering, windlass, and navigation systems. Sophie has held up extremely well and suffered no catastrophic damage. But now that we are in New Zealand, we decided to take advantage of the skilled local workforce and have Sophie undergo a bit of a refit after all these years. Let’s walk through some of the work we are having done.

Forward Lockers
As I mentioned in a previous post, we experienced some problems with the bulkheads (walls) in the forward lockers behind each trampoline. The pounding over the course of our Pacific crossing caused the walls and floors to separate, ultimately allowing a decent amount of seawater to drain into our starboard bilge on our last passage, from Fiji to Opua. This is a phenomenon cruisers try to avoid. We use these lockers to store spare anchors, anchor chain, and piles of extra lines and rope which all became quite heavy when wet. I now believe this added weight contributed to the damage.

We asked a local builder, Peter Sowman, to do the repair. His guys, including “Big Rob” shown here, had to grind out the bedding and glass in the lockers to prepare them for the repair.

He reglassed the walls together and sprayed hardening foam under the floor for extra support. The result is a pair of lockers that are now stronger and drier than the original.

As part of this repair we asked him to fabricate and mount four stainless steel rails on each side of the lockers. These will enable us to hang lines in a manner where they will be able to stay dry (and therefore remain much lighter.) We also won’t use these lockers to store chain or spare anchors any more.

Aft Vent Covers
On Sophie’s transom are 2 plastic covers that partially protect the intake for air vents that go down into each of the engine rooms. They are mostly cosmetic but unfortunately over the last 5 years had faded into two different colors. One became tan, and the other became whitish. Having two-tone rear panels became annoying, but the Pacific Ocean solved this problem for us by ripping off one of the covers on the passage from Bora Bora to Rarotonga. Peter replaced both covers in matching white.

Leaks
Over the course of the journey we developed identical leaks on either side of the main salon, right where the stairs go down to the port hull on one side and to the owner’s cabin on the other side. It’s fairly normal for cruising sailboats to develop little leaks, but it can be a real pain to find them, because water can travel a long way from the hole it uses to enter the boat to the hole it uses to enter the cabin. The leak on the port side was worse and usually occurred when we had a strong wind/wave action on the beam, which happened on our passages to Rarotonga and to Opua. Just this last week we had a violent and torrential rainstorm with swirling winds right here at the dock, and both leaks occurred simultaneously. We knew we needed to get them fixed.

So the next day Jenna and I removed ceiling panels in each hull and started doing some leak sleuthing, a process involving spraying jets of high pressure water on different points of the boat while hoping to spot the hidden location where water drips in. We were relieved to see that water wasn’t coming down from the flybridge because that could have been a much bigger problem to find and fix. After a while we spotted the problem: water was coming in from the seal around the panoramic side windows in the salon and then through a bolt hole used to hold the flybridge to the deck.

Here is the general area where the water comes in.

And here is a closeup of the hole in the window seal. It’s amazing how such a small pinprick in the window seal can result in such a large amount of inflow when you are offshore in beam seas.

Once the water gets inside of the window seal pinprick, it travels along the fiberglass base of the window in search of any kind of opening that gives it the opportunity to enter the cabin and make the floor slippery and wet. We found a tiny hole in the seal right here, where a bolt goes through the fiberglass in order to connect the flybridge to the deck.

We will have the inner and outer seals resealed this week.

Dinghy
Sophie’s tender is way more than just our “dinghy”, it’s our car, pickup truck, ski boat, and remote fishing/beer-drinking platform. We use it a lot, and it’s never let us down.

Except for when we punctured one of the air tubes by bouncing off a semi-submerged steel plate protruding from a concrete pier in Tonga. Or when the engine’s choke cable seized, resulting in our having to pull the cord 15 times to start the engine in the morning or late at night. Or when we left the dinghy in the water overnight a few times in Musket Cove, resulting in a nice shiny green undercoating on its normally bright white hull.

Back in San Diego we had a canvas cover fabricated for the dinghy. It preserves the life of the inflatable fabric. Unfortunately in the Marquesas — Hiva Oa  to be precise — I left the dinghy tied to a stone jetty, and in 10 minutes a hole had rubbed through the canvas cover on the port bow. Over the course of the summer this hole increased in size and was joined by 2 additional ones at the forward davit strap and on the starboard bow.

Needless to say there was a need for some serious dinghy love. So here in Opua we had the dinghy engine completely serviced, including re-drilling the screw holes on the bottom cover (remember those, Dan?) so we can now remove and change the oil filter. More importantly, we had the canvas cover repaired and added a new insulated canvas cover for the engine. It’s teal, matching the color of Sophie’s lettering. I also scrubbed off all of the green from the hull. Overall the dinghy is looking pretty sweet and runs great.

Cockpit Table
Sophie’s aft cockpit table has been the gathering point for many really fun dinners and some late nights over the years. We use the table so frequently that we simply leave it out all of the time, and the tropical sun combined with the Pacific’s salt has not been kind to it. So here in Opua we had the table stripped and re-varnished.

We will also start leaving the cover on most of the time.

While we were table-less, our friends Jeff and Melody from Double Diamond came over for a drink and brought their Lagoon 440’s aft cockpit cocktail table with them. It fits in the exact same holes as Sophie’s big table and was a fun alternative, creating more of an aft cockpit lounge vibe. So we are going to look into having a small cocktail table made, either from a small surfboard or wakeboard, and use that for special occasions. We need to have this ready before Randy and Susan’s next visit.

Sails
Sophie still has it’s four original sails – mainsail, jib, code zero, and spinnaker — and all of them remain in very good shape. The mainsail is big (almost 1,000 square feet) with a full roach, full battens, and 3 reef points. If you recall, we put a small tear in the main on the passage to Rarotonga, and the repair we had done there has held up well. However we did experience significant chafe along the upper batten pockets where the sail had rubbed against the shrouds while running on a reach.

There is a new North Sails loft here in Opua, and they replaced the mainsail batten pockets with stronger material (above), and also added a reef block and a batten car attachment point.

I am now convinced that the leading source of damage to sails offshore is the use of electric winches for reefing and trimming. All of that extra power in the wrong hands can cause things like canvas, lines and blocks to break. That’s how we lost a reefing line on the Marquesas passage, how we tore the sail on the way to Rarotonga, and how I broke a downhaul in Fiji. Personally I have become much more gentle in how I use the electric winches offshore, relying way more on a sense of touch rather than brute force.

Anyway, taking down or putting back up our mainsail is a half-day job. Here is Jenna with an allen wrench and some pins.

The jib needed some work as well. North Sails replaced the tape that runs along the foot and leach, repaired some damage to the sunbrella, and reinforced and enlarged a chafe patch where the sail can hit the spreaders.

Later this week we will decide whether or not we will reconfigure our code zero and leave it permanently rigged to our bowsprit. Having multiple furling sails is becoming increasingly popular, including on all new Lagoons, because it provides added flexibility. For us to do so on Sophie will require at least the addition of a strip of sunproof fabric along the edge of the sail. We will also need to rig a permanent solution for the continuous furler, and some of our guest crew have given us some good suggestions on how to do this.

Our spinnaker that we have used extensively, made with love by Carol Hasse’s team up at Port Townsend Sails, needs no work and is still a wonderful sail.

Rigging
The jib is rigged with a Facnor furling system that includes an aluminum foil that extends up the entire length of the forestay.

This foil is fabricated from 6 foot long pieces of extruded aluminum that are bolted together using inserts as connectors. Over the course of a lot of miles some of the holes in these forestay pieces and the holes in the inserts worked a little loose.

This looseness caused some aluminum dust and stains would appear on the jib after heavy rainstorms. More importantly, looseness increases the risk that the entire furling system could break, which could result in bad things happening to Sophie in a heavy storm.

So we had some local riggers remove our forestay and furler, and then remachine all of the holes in the foil pieces and connectors in their machine shop.

It’s all back together now and as good as new.

I must confess it was a little disconcerting being on Sophie on a dock for a few days with heavy winds blowing and listening to our mast creaking back and forth because our forestay was in a machine shop up the street.

We had 3 halyards tied to the crossbeam to help stabilize the mast, but it still wasn’t the same as having a forestay. And it wasn’t just me and Jenna feeling a bit of unease, some of our neighbors joked that they were worried Sophie’s mast could come crashing down on them. But everything worked out OK.

The riggers found a few more areas that needed attention. They re-machined the gooseneck fitting where the boom meets the mast, eliminating a bit of play that had developed there.

They replaced and/or repaired the sheaves at the top of the mast, at the end of the boom and on the traveler. They replaced the main halyard (chafe at the top of the mast) and the spinnaker halyard (too stretchy, especially if we are going to rig the code zero permanently). They now look nice and are Christmas colored. Here is the spinnaker halyard:

And here is the main halyard (with a new block).

Canvas
It’s amazing how prolonged exposure to the sun and salt can damage canvas. Back in Seattle, we had a canvas and vinyl enclosure for Sophie’s aft cockpit, and we would use this from late August to late June. But we put it away in San Diego, except for one small piece that protected the area directly behind the aft cockpit sink. The zipper, canvas webbing, and threads on this one piece were destroyed over the course of our crossing, so we had a local canvas shop repair the entire enclosure. We’ll probably put it away again until we return to Seattle, but we will do so knowing that it is intact and ready for to keep us warm in 10 months of cold rain per year.

We also have a flybridge bimini on Sophie, and historically we used it from late June to early August in Seattle and then put it away for the rest of the year. Well, the bimini went up in San Diego and has remained up ever since. The tropical sun damaged some of the stitching and canvas webbing, so we had the local canvas shop replace them. The bimini is back up now and looks great.

We also have a mainsail cover made from the same Sunbrella fabric as the bimini. Over the course of the crossing the cover crept forward along the boom, causing the forward edges of the cover to come in contact with reefing lines, which resulted in some significant chafe damage.

We had the local North loft repair the chafe damage, and we will do a better job in the future to secure the mainsail cover to prevent creepiness.

When we were in San Diego, we went to a Home Depot and bought some inexpensive deck shading material, and en route to the Marquesas we fabricated some makeshift aft cockpit shades. These turned out to be ugly but practical, and a lifesaver during late afternoons when the temperature was still in the high 90s. We decided to splurge and have the local canvas shop fabricate some permanent sunshades using the same fittings used by our winter cockpit enclosure. We hope to have these done and in place in time for the after party we’ll wind up hosting on Sophie after we attend the Boxing Day races with in Auckland with Misti Landtroop in a couple of weeks.

Shore Power
Like most US sailboats, Sophie is a 110 volt boat in a 220 volt world. Because of this we haven’t been connected to shore power since San Diego, putting 940 hours on our genset since March. Needless to say, we enjoy the creature comforts that 110 volt electricity brings to our lives.

But we are on the dock here in Opua so we decided to save wear and tear on the genset and switch to shore power. Fortunately when we commissioned Sophie we installed an isolation transformer that protects Sophie’s metal from marina-induced corrosion while also offering the capability to convert 220 volt Kiwi shore power to 110 volt Sophie power. So we hired a mechanic to reconfigure the transformer and we assumed we were all set to plug into New Zealand’s power grid.

But we weren’t all set. It turns out that New Zealand’s government requires all boats that connect to shore power have a government-issued “Warrant of Fitness” for their electrical system AND their power cable. Now back in the US I am all for liberty and freedom and all that “don’t tread on me” stuff, but it turns out in New Zealand they enjoy all of those freedoms AND have lower boat insurance rates and virtually no electricity-induced marina fires because the government makes sure that all boats are properly wired. It’s a good system and I like it. We got our sticker and plugged in.

But our problems didn’t end there. We kept tripping the circuit breaker on our transformer when Sophie asked for too much power from the dock, something that usually occurs when we turn on the clothes drier, dishwashers, or Nespresso machine. We used to encounter this problem on the floating docks at Point Hudson Marina back in Port Townsend and would simply adjust down the amount we would draw from shore until the transformer would stop tripping. Except that here in New Zealand we tripped the transformer so often that we wore out the transformer’s circuit breaker in a couple of days. It turns out that part wasn’t designed to trip more than a handful of times.

It was clear that our isolation transformer was undersized, limited to just 16 amps  @240 volts. The local sparkies (Kiwi term for marine electrician) offered to upgrade our transformer to a 32 amp version of the same unit and install it at a good price, all on the next day. We agreed, but when the sparkies inspected the new part they realized that it wasn’t internally configured according to the documentation and the model number painted on the outside of the box. Victron Energy, the manufacturer, has recently relocated their manufacturing to China and are experiencing some teething pains as a result. It also turns out that the local sparkies are really really good  at what they do. They got a loaner part from the manufacturer for us to use for a few months, installed a separate galvanic isolator, and we no longer lose shore power when we brew a long shot. Our new permanent and properly configured replacement is on order, to be installed after the holidays.

Watermaker
We used Sophie’s watermaker to produce all of the fresh water we consumed from San Diego to New Zealand, with the exception of one tankful in Rarotonga (dirty harbor) and then another right before we left Fiji for Opua. The general view held by all of the cruisers we meet out here is that it’s not a question of whether or not your watermaker will break, it’s a question of when. Overall we are extremely happy with the performance of our system, and the need to make fresh water is a main reason why we ran our genset so frequently. But as we prepared to leave Fiji for New Zealand, the throughput of our watermaker fell from 22 gallons per hour down to 8 gallons per hour and then it basically stopped working. Its “energy transfer device” — a system of pistons that low-power watermakers like our’s use create enough pressure to strip the salt from salt water as it is forced through a series of filtering membranes — wore out and needed to be rebuilt. That’s been done. We also needed to rebuild the 110 volt Catpower pump that drives the water into the system. It turns out that it suffered salt and sediment damage, and we will install an additional 25 mm prefilter in front of the 110 volt pump to prevent that from happening in the future. All of this should be up and running by the end of the week.

Diesel Heater
We have a Webasto diesel cabin heater that we ran for 4,000 hours over our 5 happy years in Seattle, and it stopped working the day we left San Diego for the South Pacific. This wasn’t an immediate problem for us when we were sweating in the Marquesas, but it was COLD when we reached New Zealand a month ago and we missed our heater. We thought it was simply an electrical problem, but the local sparkies took it apart and learned that the burners had basically worn out due to 4,000 hours of usage combined with some water damage. We had installed the heater without a fuel-water separator (Racor filter) in the fuel line between the tank and the unit, and water from the fuel tank occasionally wound up getting mixed with the fuel that was being burned, and this is apparently not good for a diesel furnace.

Since there is no one in New Zealand who can rebuild these systems, it wound up being easier for us to simply (and reluctantly) order a new unit from Seattle. Our friends Ian and Becky hand carried the diesel furnace on their flight to Auckland, cleverly disguising the unit as a pink handbag.

We are having the new heater, along with a new fuel-water separator, installed this week.

Dishwasher
We love our Fischer & Paykel dishwasher, and Kiwis love them as well because they happen to be designed and manufactured right here in New Zealand. We also looked forward to using it every day in New Zealand, now that we were going to be attached to shore power and shore water for a few weeks.

Unfortunately, the day we arrived in New Zealand was the day Hazel engaged in some liquid soap/jewelry making/stuffed animal parade game, and to clean up her mess she inadvertently put her liquid soap covered cups into the dishwasher. As the dishwasher began to run, it produced a funny noise, wouldn’t turn off and displayed an “F1” error message.

I looked it up on the web, and the F&P F1 error message indicates machine flooding, and some life hacker sites described how you could fix the problem with a hair drier. So I took the drawer out, dried it with a hair drier, and the error persisted. After a day or two, I called Fischer & Paykal customer service. When I described the problem to the woman who answered the phone, she said “Oh, it’s flooding. You’ll need to get a technician out there with a hair drier to fix it.”

She referred me to a couple of local firms, and we finally got one of them to come out to the boat. (Their appointment was conveniently scheduled right as some of their friends next door were about to go out fishing, and they finished on Sophie at the exact same time as when the beer arrived on the neighboring boat. Kiwis have a high quality of life, you know.) Anyway, there were two repairmen, an older guy and his apprentice. They disassembled the dishwasher drawers (turns out more could be disassembled than what I had done), looked at the pumps, then looked up at me and asked “Have you got a hair dryer, mate?” They pulled out a circuit board, used the hair dryer to dry it off, then put it back into the machine. Repair done, and no new parts. I now know how to repair an F&P F1 error.

A Better Boat
That wraps up the main list of things we had addressed here in Opua over the last month. We also had the boat detailed, polished and waxed. We did a thorough spring cleaning of the interior and examined the contents of every cabinet on the boat. We reorganized how we store food and spare parts. All of the wine and liquor now fit in just one of the forward bilges — there has been some shrinkage, as they say in the retail industry. Most importantly, we feel that we know the boat much better now than we ever have in the past and are learning how to live on her full-time.

We are so lucky to be doing this trip, and to have a boat that holds up so well. Next stop, Auckland!