Dolphins! and Penguins! and Wallabies! Oh my!

Recently we sailed from the Bay of Islands to Auckland, and it was a trip filled with wild beasties. We spotted jellyfish, little blue penguins, small white and grey dolphins that swam with our boat, wallabies - not just small kangaroos!, native wood pigeons and peacocks.

This jellyfish was quite large and I really enjoyed watching it swim all around. One of the locals laughed at me for taking pictures of a jellyfish, but what can I say- there weren't any where I can from, and who knew they have spots??

The Bay of Islands (BOI) is an amazing place. I must have taken 700 pictures just like this one because everywhere you look it is just heartbreakingly beautiful. Sadly, pictures cannot do it justice. You will just have to come and see for yourself!

This is Hole In The Rock, and is a major tourist destination. At low tide boats can fit through the hole.

More wild beasties. That red flag is the flag of the Vice Commodore for our yachting club. That's right- we were invited to sail with the Vice Commodore! I tell you New Zealand is the most fantastic and fascinating place! Yachting seems so snooty in the US, but here everyone sails, and lots of people have boats and most are quite happy to invite us along! I think we are very lucky people.

This is for those of you that want to see more of the boat. I'll let B explain what happened to the main sail.
In BOI we anchored in this small, quiet nook and rowed to the beach:

And hiked up to this cemetary on the hill:

Quite a nice place to spend eternity, really.

But most importantly, we saw Dolphins:





P has declared that seeing these dolphins was one of the best experiences of her entire life. I think dolphins have this effect on a lot of people as our good friend, la hamburgler, went swimming in the BOI and told us that it was one of the most amazing experiences of his life.

B took some lovely video of the dolphins, which I will endeavor to install in this post later.

Then we went to Kawau, and the Mansion House. B has been here before, so read more about it here.
Below is a picture of the boat from the beach, above.

Here we saw wekas (a native bird that is very rare and reminds me of little dinosaurs), peacocks, wallabies and the also rare native wood pigeon, which is very fat and heavy looking for a bird, and makes a lot of noise when it flies.


This is the wood pigeon. This is a rather slimming photo of the bird, I think. Imagine it weighing an additional kilogram, and wheezing when it flies and you have a good idea of what I'm talking about.

On the Midnight Boat to Kawau

All my (not so) hard work getting to know how to sail and crew on racing yachts led to being invited on a destination race to a nearby island, Kawau. The trip down involved me, the two boat owners, and the wife and small daughter of one owner. This boat was quite a bit bigger than the one I usually race on. Combine that with some pretty good sized seas and the spinnaker that was flown to good effect up to North Head and you have some exciting sailing.

Even more exciting when the skipper went under water while dropping the spinnaker during a gusty wind shift and an unexpected broach. In any case, we lost most of our lead but got it under control and had a nice reach up to Kawau. It was at night, by the way, and I got my first sighting of the Southern Cross. We ended up 2nd on the line and 2nd on handicap.

Kawau Island is beautiful; the bay we anchored in has an impressive Victorian mansion built by an early Governor.

There was some neat fauna - some of it native, like this weka. Apparently there are kiwi but I didn't see any.
There were wallabies, however!
Apparently this island and the eccentric ex-governor introduced quite a few species to NZ. Modern conservation ethic in NZ keeps you from doing this for a good reason. One of the species introduced to the island was the Australian opossum, now it is a scourge to the native bush all over NZ.

On Saturday the skipper dove for scallops and we fished. I caught three Kahawai on a total of one baiting and two casts. Not bad.

But I did not win the competition - they wouldn't count my double catch as one fish.

These plants look familiar - straight from AZ?

The skipper and I raced home on Sunday. We got a poor start this time and spent the day dealing with gusts and wound up putting a reef in. That's not the way to win races but it was a good idea under the conditions.

Near Takapuna we (almost) ran into competitors racing tornado's (the Olympic catamaran class). One of them went flying by at 20ish knots just astern with a displeased look. The next weekend was the world championships so getting in the way this time wasn't so bad.