We tied up at the visitor’s dock of the Napier Sailing Club, which is right along the sea wall in front of the club house. The facility and the people at the Napier Sailing Club were top notch. They were very kind and inexhaustibly patient with us.

We were very well treated in Napier and would stop there again.

Gisborne’s business district starts right at the marina. Gisborne is a large town and the regional centre, and as such has a fairly large commercial district. We enjoyed shopping and several good meals.

Gisborne has a small harbour almost completely occupied by a small marina. There are four docks and room for sixty boats, mostly small recreational fishing boats. We were charged just over $2/m/night for our berth. The docks have some slight surge, but noticeably less than at most New Zealand harbours.

The Gisborne Tatapouri Sports Fishing Club is located at the head of the docks. They are in the habit of giving temporary memberships to visiting boats, though this is supposedly not guaranteed. Without a membership they have good food and inexpensive beer. With the membership you can also use the showers located in the restaurant’s main bathrooms.

Gisborne is quite isolated, so you’re not going to be stopping in unless you need to. Still, we had a good time and find Gisborne easy to recommend.

We have two pieces of advice. First, do what you can to avoid having a problem. Check everything that comes aboard. We don’t allow cardboard to come aboard in the tropics, which can be a challenge. We also double seal all food, which helps to control most pests.
Second, be prepared to eradicate whatever comes aboard. Be sure to have insecticide aboard. Use it liberally at the early stages of a problem.

Thanks to our precautions with food we never had any serious trouble with those kinds of bugs. Most times that we got bananas we picked up an ant or three, but that was about it.

What we did have were bed bugs. They plagued us for years, and took a huge amount of the joy out of cruising. We did everything that we could to get rid of them, and for the longest time nothing worked. For about six months after we picked them up, we thought we had them under control with insecticide spray. Essentially we just bred insecticide resistance into them. We tried herbal remedies (Neem oil) to no effect. We set off bug bombs, and increased our dosage of insecticide. We learned that there is no way to heat a boat hot enough to kill beg bugs while the boat is in the water. We used week after week, month after month of specialized bed bug specific insecticide. The net result of all of these was that we slowly poisoned ourselves.

Things got desperate, and remained desperate way for a very long time. We had heated discussions about giving up our lifestyle as a bed bug control tactic.

Finally, we found some diatomous earth when we arrived in New Zealand this season. We’d been looking for it for years, but it is hard to find. We tracked it down at Putiputi Ra, just outside the town basin in Whangarei. (Their website is dead. Contact them at 79 Walton St Whangarei. Phone: (09) 430 0606.) We applied a couple cups of it around our bed once, and haven’t seen the bed bugs since. Frankly I’m still surprised. We must have applied almost as much weight of the active ingredients of insecticide as we did of the diatomous earth. But the bed bugs can’t move through/over/past the diatomous earth, and cut off from their food supply they’ve died out.

The main thing to do about bed bugs is to be really careful about not picking them up. Learn to identify them and the stains they leave in their habitat. This is a photo of an adult bed bug, they look like fat ants.

Bed bugs leave little dark red to black spots in their habitat. Check the corners of mattresses for them. Do not allow yourself or your luggage to come into contact with them. And if you have any doubts about having contacted them, freeze all of your clothing and luggage solid before bringing it back aboard.

So, be careful and be prepared. Don’t forget your insecticide spray and bring some diatomous earth just in case.

Scream has 390 watts of solar panels, which works out to 1 KWh per day as an annual average. We run them through an MPPT charge controller, which adjusts the voltage to maximize the amps absorbed by the batteries. In mid 2010 we added a wind turbine, which is rated at 300 watts and averages about 1/10th of a KWh per day.

Our main load is a freezer. We also have lights, navigation equipment, radios, and a 2 KW inverter that we use mostly for our laptops.

Chronologically the first thing that went wrong for us, and the first thing you need to guard against, was the failure of our single source of electricity. In 2009 Scream was a solar powered boat. We have a diesel engine for propulsion, and it does have an alternator, but we existed almost entirely off our solar panels. Then in October 2009 our charge controller died. Xantrex replaced it free of charge, but we were without solar power for four months. We ran the engine for power a bit, but mostly we cut away at our already tiny energy budget. Don’t let this happen to you: if you’re going to live off grid you need at least two completely independent sources of electricity.

Controlling your consumption is usually more practical than increasing your electricity generation. LED lights are a must. We have fluorescent, compact fluorescent, and LED lights on board.

Batteries are a temporary power storage technology. They are most suited to getting your boat through the night, not through long periods of time. On Scream we had a 1260 Amp hour bank of AGM batteries that cost $5,000. Notice the past tense. They went entire seasons between being fully charged as we cycled them in their bottom half. Not surprisingly, they died in less than half of their design lifespan. Instead of buying lots of batteries with less ability to charge them, we should have bought fewer batteries with more generating ability. As an absolute rule, the cost of your power generation equipment should exceed the cost of your batteries. For a primarily solar powered boat, another measure would be for the amp hours of your battery bank to be roughly equal to the watt rating of your solar panels.

While we’re on batteries, if you’re in the tropics the heat damages batteries. When we were in El Salvador the overnight lows were 29 or 30 celsius. Your battery care instructions say that your batteries should never be allowed to get to that hot, and those were the ambient daily lows. If you are in the tropics you will regularly exceed the design specifications of your batteries. So don’t bring a lot of expensive batteries into the tropics, they won’t last.

Refrigeration is the big consumer of electricity. When we are flush with power the refrigerator is half of our daily use, when we are rationing that figure approaches 99%. I strongly recommend not having a freezer on a cruising boat in the tropics. If we didn’t have a freezer then our available power would have averaged ten times what it was. Or phrased differently, if we didn’t have a freezer we could have had half the generating capacity and still taken much better care of our batteries.
If you are going to have a freezer, make it efficient.
If you are going to stock your freezer, and rely upon that food in your provisioning, then you need a fossil-fuel generator. I sincerely wish that this wasn’t true and I tried to deny it for years. But after killing a battery bank and still repeatedly throwing out food that wasn’t properly frozen, and repeatedly eating “food” that was going bad because there wasn’t anything else, I have to insist that depending on a renewable-powered freezer in the tropics is wrong.

We recently acquired a 1 KW gasoline generator. It has helped. I wish that I didn’t need it, but it would have greatly improved the morale of the crew last season in the tropics. We’re running it less than an hour a week, mainly because the cold waters of New Zealand make the refrigeration efficient.

Before we acquired the generator we ran our 64 horse power diesel to charge the batteries. Truth be told, between running the engines at anchor and motoring when we could have sailed but needed the electricity, we burned something like a litre of diesel a day “for electricity”. That is a frightening long term average. It should sober anyone who makes it this far in the post and still thinks that a fossil fuel generator isn’t necessary for them. If we’d had that gasoline generator we’d have made twice the power for less than half of the fuel burned.

We’re going back on grid shortly. We’re so exicted. It’s like we’re addicts waiting for our fix or children finally getting the toy they’ve always wanted. We won’t use anywhere near the power we did when we lived on land, but being able to use our laptops whenever we want is going to be huge for us.

To summarize, living off grid is tough. You’ll enjoy it more if you have several means of power generation. Try to keep your power consumption down. Your refrigeration draws almost all of your non-discretionary load so focus on it. Batteries are for short term storage, not for powering your fridge during week-long rains.  But with self control and careful planning, you can live off grid on your boat too.

We stayed at the Tauranga Bridge Marina.  The marina staff are great and their rates are very competitive.  There is a nice cafe and restaurant. Unfortunately there is a couple knots of current running through the marina at most times.  And the marina is quite isolated.  The walk to the nearest bus stop is more than a ten minutes, so we mostly walked the twenty minutes into the business district.

The marine industry in Tauranga is strong.  We received professional and inexpensive assistance from Battery Warehouse and Logicool refrigeration.

Tauranga is a small city with a very active port.  There are berths for a about a dozen ships and there was constant traffic.

On our way out of Tauranga, we passed within a few miles of the wreck of the M/V Rena.  The salvage operation continues, though I am skeptical given that almost half a year has gone by and much clearly remains to be done.  It seems obvious to me that there is no intent to move the wreck.  The wreck is in two pieces, both at least 10 meters above water and clearly visible at great distance.  On the positive side, the water is clear and the pod of dolphins we spotted nearby indicate that whatever pollution resulted from the wreck has dissipated.

The tide runs at a couple knots between Cape Colville and Great Barrier Island. As every sailor from Alaska to Seattle knows well, this causes problems that do not occur elsewhere. When the tide is opposed, the current is sufficiently strong to slow movement considerably, keeping the boat in the straight.  The more interesting condition occurs when the current is favourable, but the wind is contrary. In these conditions the current shortens the apparent wavelength of the wave and swell. The seas become steeper, and usually somewhat higher. This situation is called a tide rip.

The gist of the matter is that rounding Cape Colville is not practical with an opposing wind. Either the current is eating up what distance that could have been made good to windward, or the tide rip is dissipating most of your forward motion into water on deck.

This is especially difficult at Cape Colville as most vessels want to travel north east from the Hauraki Gulf to the Cape and then south east, or north west from the other direction and then south west. Easterlies and westerlies are both uncommon in New Zealand waters. For the westward passage, the usual counter clockwise (backing) shift works, but is essentially motoring in calm conditions as the SE to NE shift is almost always very light. For the eastward passage, the backing wind changes make conditions less favourable, so planning for a wind change mid-route is out. And, as the westerlies tend to be strong, travelling north east on the first leg with the north westerly will be uncomfortable. So you either run before the south wester, which is typically gale force, then hug the coast once east of Cape Colville, or you also motor in the calm.

Best of luck, either way.

Port Fitzroy is a magnificent harbour.  It has two narrow and protected enterances, leading to a large harbour.  Port Fitzroy harbour is almost four miles north to south with an average width of almost half a mile.  There are five bays.

The shop in Port Fitzroy has basics, like bread, eggs, and milk, and on the days when the ferry arrives, a good selection of produce.  Currently the ferry arrives Tuesdays and Fridays.  On these days the burger hut remains open from lunch to dinner, on other days it is lunch only.

We went on the hike to the Kauri dams, which was quite challenging and just not worth the effort.

We enjoyed wood-fired baths at Smokehouse bay, which I highly recommend.

Unfortunately, it has been blowing hard most of the time that we have been here. Honestly, it is the windiest weather that I can recall. We’ve had two days with gusts to storm force, another six days of gale force winds, and only one day in fifteen with less than 25 knots forecast.

Telecom’s cell service, which has been flawless everywhere else that we have been, has been unreliable here.  The behaviour is not like holes in coverage, it is more like the towers are going off and on randomly. Vodaphone’s network has always been available, so we have “emergency only” service all the time and telecom maybe 1/3 of the time.  This is rather frustrating. In Tryphena we had no service from any provider, despite being anchored only 50 meters from town and a telephone booth.

In Fiji the following are readily available in large towns:

• Bread, flour
• Pasta, ramen
• Canned meat
• Fish in all forms

The selection of fresh fruit and vegetables is usually quite limited and the quality mediocre. Tomatoes, okra, cucumbers, egg plants, pineapples, mangoes, bananas, and peppers are usually available. Canned vegetables are limited in supply and selection, so bring more than you think you will use.

Dairy products, particularly butter and cheese, are usually sold-out, so stock up whenever they are plentiful.

The following foods are expensive and/or difficult to find and you should bring a whole season’s supply:

1. Coffee, except for instant which is readily available
2. Pre-made/package sauces
3. Snacks like potato chips
4. Crackers, unless you like curry-spice on them

Alcohol is subject to duty, so we recommend bringing only your quota. However premium brands of hard liquor are obscenely expensive, for example 750ml of Bailey’s is F$120 (US$65). The only hard liquor at reasonable prices is the local rum, vodka, and gin.

Complicating matters further, most boats spend extended periods away from the population centres. In the towns groceries are cheap. In the minor islands, like the Yasawas, there is very little food available for purchase.  We visited two towns where there was no cash economy so we could not purchase any food.  Even in the popular remote areas, like Musket Cove, groceries are ridiculously expensive. So expect to eat from preserved foods more than you would elsewhere. We recommend buying your food in Suva, Lautoka, Nadi, Savusavu, Taveuni, or Labasa.

Pier 21 is wonderful.  It is the best located and best priced marina in Auckland for a live aboard.  Pier 21 is a ten minute walk to the Central Business District or a five minute walk to the Viaduct.  The chandleries are all within two blocks.  There are a few restaurants nearby, including the very reasonably priced bar at Swashbucklers.

Unlike Bayswater where we stayed last year, Pier 21 is very well sheltered.  We were bothered by neither winds nor wakes. And while the much larger marina at Westhaven is co-located from the water, it is between three and ten blocks further from all services by land.

If you are going to take a dock in Auckland, whether for the season or for a night, we recommend Pier 21.

The island itself is a delight. We landed on Hobb’s beach and walked the Kawerau track, after making the mistake of walking up cable road first. (Kawerau track leaves the beach 5m north of the washroom, not alongside the washroom). in our brief hour ashore we saw saddelbacks, New Zealand Pigeons, Tui, Stitchbirds, and Kakariki along with hordes of difficult to identify songbirds. The number and diversity of birds on Tiritiri is much greater than on most islands in the Hauraki Gulf.

Unfortunately, the anchorage at Tiritiri is marginal. There is room for about a dozen 12m yachts in a shallow cove 3-4m, sand bottom. We anchored at 36? 36.23 S 174? 55.98 E. The wind shelter is from the east and northeast, but there is no shelter from swell. We arrived on a calm day (variable 5) and decided against staying the night. Luckily Kawau is only 15 miles north, Islington 15 miles south, and a variety of other anchorages lie between.

Tiritiri is nice to visit, especially if you happen to be transiting the coast on a calm day with a couple hours to spare. If birds aren’t your thing, or if it is blowing, I would recommend giving it a pass.

So we decided the try propspeed.  Propspeed goes on with a spray gun and hardens to a gelatin-like coating.  We paid about NZ$100 to have our 18″, three-blade propeller coated.

This is four months growth.  The blades are mostly still visible and most of the growth is soft.

We are thrilled with the results.  Propspeed keeps the propeller clean.  We went from cleaning with a chisel every month to wiping the propeller with a cloth a couple times a year.  More importantly, as the propeller is cleaner on average our motoring speed is up about 10% at the same engine RPM.

Scream highly recommends propspeed.  Try it, we think that you’ll like it.

We really like Whangarei and the town basin marina. Whangarei has a lot of services to offer to boats. There are sail lofts, chandleries, yards, mechanics, welders, painters, and refrigeration guys. Notice the plurals; there is competition here, so prices are significantly lower than elsewhere in New Zealand.

We can’t say enough good things about the Town Basin Marina either. The Town Basin itself is ridiculously secure from weather. There is never any wave and winds are much reduced. The Marina facilities are in great condition, and the people who run the marina are wonderful. The town basin marina is also among the least expensive places to keep a boat in Northern New Zealand, especially if you’re willing to take a pile mooring rather than a dock. We’ve had Scream on the piles in Whangarei last year and we did them again this year. Being on a mooring is much more private and reassuring to us.

In Whangarei, we recommend Frings and the Judge for pub food, Amici for nicer dining, and Killer Prawn for special occasions. The Whangarei pool is across the street from the marina and is worth a visit. The walk alongside the Hatea river to AH Reed Park to see the giant Kauri trees is quite pleasant. There are two art galleries and a clock museum adjacent the marina office, all of which are interesting enough if not big attractions.

Whangarei is our home town in New Zealand. We miss it when we are away and we always look forward to our returns.

We anchored in four different locations inside Whangaroa’s large harbour. First we waited out an easterly blow in Pararako Bay. The bottom here was described as M.cS.bkSh, which intimidated even us. Some time with the guide translated this as mud, coarse sand, and broken shells. That’s a lot of words to say that anchors hold well there.

The water in Whangaroa was quite clear when we arrived, with visibility of perhaps 5m, easily the best that we have had in New Zealand. We had the privilege of seeing a pod of Orca with some juveniles or new borns.

Next we anchored off the Whanagroa Marina. The facilities there are newer and nicer than we expected. Top marks for them, especially for letting have the run of the place for free. The Whangaroa Sport Fishing Club (formerly Whangaroa Big Gamefishing Club) is at the top of the marina docks. Their restaurant and bar are good and inexpensive, and the fish mounted on the walls are very impressive. I ‘m not sure that I would have believed that Marlins exceed 400 Kg if I hadn’t seen them. There isn’t much more to the village, other than the general store south of the marina. We got eggs, bread, and somewhat fresh vegetables there.

We moved on to Rere Bay, where we anchored in the cove on the south side of the peninsula to the north. It’s a bit of a tight fit, but very pretty. The wind shelter there is excellent, though what wind that arrives when a north easterly is blowing comes from all directions. We swung quite lazily.

We rounded out our trip in Waitepipi, reputedly the best anchorage in New Zealand. We had a great time, though I preferred Rere myself.

Somehow we had cell service throughout the harbour, even though there is little settlement.

Whangaroa is a great place to get away from the crowds and tour boats of the Bay of Islands. Whangaroa is about 30nm north west of the Bay of Islands, so you’ll want to wait for favourable weather before sailing between them.

This is Scream at anchor in Paihia as seen from Waitangi. The perspective is a little odd in this photo. We’re much closer to the beach at the right than to the town in the centre.

While anchored here we went to the Countdown grocery and to the Waitangi treaty grounds.

Most cruisers leave their boats in Opua and travel to Paihia for groceries. We took the infrequent, inconvenient, and expensive shuttle from Opua to Paihia a few times last year, and decided that there must be a better way. Now that we have tried it we definitely prefer anchoring at Pahia to get groceries over travelling from Opua.