Tuesday 6 March 2012

It begins!

Welcome!

We've decided to start doing the blog thing, seeing as we now own a boat and in a few weeks we will have her home with us. Because I am a master procrastinator, we have left this until the last minute. We wanted to document our entire sailing adventure, but the idea of sailing around the world formed so slowly and progressed at a trickle until it was a year later and we'd bought a boat and the adventure had already begun. So instead of starting at the beginning I thought the least we could do was start with our first big trip, which will be the delivery.

We've only sailed her once, for the sea trial, down a narrow river directly into the wind. For anybody not familiar with sailing, this is not a thing. You can't sail straight into the wind, and you can't really sail across a narrow river. We did find a wider section to play around in though, and we even got the kite up - for a few minutes. She sails perfectly, and neither of us can wait for when we finally get to sail her properly.

Sailing with a brand new mainsail
Heartbeat!

Looking down from the top of the mast. She's so pretty!


Buying a boat is a harrowing, nail biting experience, much like buying a house. Nothing in your price range will ever be perfect unless you sleep on a bed of money each night, and boats will always need work. It's just a matter of figuring out how much work you're willing to put in for the price you're paying. We've been looking at boats online for about a year now, and there's only been two that we really considered going to see that we missed out on. So it's reasonably safe to say we've seen almost all the boats in NZ that fit our criteria. We are probably pickier than most people though - I had a big long list of things that it absolutely had to have, and a list of things that we wanted it to have. No boat was ever going to be perfect, but the only thing we wanted that our boat doesn't have is a... oh hang on, it IS perfect! It has EVERYTHING! Except some fancier electronics that we don't really need, and an anchor winch, which I wish we didn't need.

When I asked Sophie, the lovely young Danish girl we bought her from, how she pulled up the anchor, she made pulling motions with her hands - just like that! An anchor is essentially a funny shaped weight, if anybody was wondering - it's heavy. Add a heap of rope and chain and mud and junk to the end of that, and it's no easy task to drag it onto the boat. But Sophie is a tiny (albeit tough) little thing and she had no problems, so it's good to know the world doesn't end when you have to drag it in yourself.

Even the name is the best out of all the boats we looked at - it's called Heartbeat. Which I like a lot better than the standard girl's name, or something with the words wind or water in it. It's also easy to say! A lot of kiwi boats have really kiwi names, which are not spelled the way they sound (to an Aussie girl anyway) - this makes things difficult over the VHF radio when you're trying to talk to people and they can't understand your boats name.

Heartbeat has been living in Whangerei (fong - er - ay for my non-kiwi friends) for a few months now, after sailing from Denmark to New Zealand. For anybody not familiar with random tiny places with weird names in New Zealand, it's way up the top of the North Island near Auckland, and we live all the way down the bottom. So sailing her home to Wellington will take about a week, with good weather. Which doesn't really exist on the other side of the ditch, but we're crossing our fingers! We're going down the East Coast, either to avoid bashing against a lee shore or to avoid a bad bit of Cook Strait or just because it's shorter, I'm not sure. But that's the way we're going!

It has been a bit anti-climatic buying a boat so far away - it was exciting then nerve-wracking and stressful then exciting and stressful and we signed the papers and then nothing. But a month has passed and soon we'll be sailing home and hopefully the feeling of it being a weird and crazy dream will dissolve as we sail our very own boat down the coast of New Zealand. So exciting things are starting to happen, and once we have the boat here we can start properly preparing to leave in a year or two.

love and best wishes,
Monique


1 comment:

  1. when you are young, your list of "I wish I had not done that" is much longer than your list of "I wish I had done that thing" But... as you get older that changes. There are like 6 billion people on this planet and 5,999,999,900 wish they had done what you are planning to do. GO NEKE!!! You will have a ball.

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