09 NZ outrigger sailing

Outrigger Canoe Sailing in New Zealand spring 2004
Trip Log, Photos, and Digressions
page 9 of 14
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Ulua tied up at the museum dock. I padded the outrigger with a lifejacket to keep it from wearing on the concrete floating dock.

More museum canoe pictures.

After the museum I sailed across the bay to the marina where I'd been told some nice people lived.

I stayed with Michael Young and Trudy Mattingly from Dallas. Thanks for the hospitality! I wish I had pictures of you to put in here.
A little solid ground was good after my brush with death by oyster germs and being extra alert to watery hazards for a few days.
Here's Ulua nestled in the gap between their yacht and their neighbor. They were cruising around the world in their yacht and stopped in New Zealand. They liked it so much they ended up staying. Now they've got friends, jobs, and a house. Michael and Harmen are both musicians. That's how they met.

Trudy says CiCi's pizza in Dallas is the place to go. All you can eat for $3.99.
A digression. There's nothing like that in NZ. In fact the lack of dive and bargain-gorging style restaurants was starting to give me culture shock.
We Americans love opportunity. That means we create wealth and poverty at once, and delight in feasting on vast quantities of nearly-poisonous food if it's a bargain.
In NZ there's no Dickensian spectacle. I strode over no derelicts. There must be laborers in the society, but as far as food is concerned everyone's a yuppie.
The eateries are all boutiques with decor, pun name and colored chalkboard menu. Fine for you nordic socialists, but I'm the belly of the beast, and it's wartime!
Give me "half baked chicken" and enough fries to spoon up a quart of ketchup. The Kiwis somehow make do with the sort of food people pay real money to eat.
My parasites were demanding food composed of sugar and fat. That wasn't on the menu, so instead I had a delicious healthy meal with my hosts to the sound of chamber music.

Michael writes marine navigation software. He says Minerva Reef is a problem. It's a tiny island that's entirely submerged at high tide.
It's in a straight line between two major ports and your autopilot will want to take you on a collision course. It's so far from other land that a raster overview map will shrink it down so you can't see it. You'll have to know where it is and zoom down into blue ocean a long way before it's as big as a pixel.
So unless your raster map has some vector smarts, there will be trouble.

We had many other fascinating discussions but unfortunately I don't keep up the journal so well when I'm around people.
Memory can be a fragile vessel for such precious things as memories.

I'd broken some sailing hardware on the canoe during the crossing. I needed a wrench to do the repairs and didn't have one. Harmen Hielkema came and helped me out.

Here's his big proa. He's sailed it with a Tornado sail, tacking and shunting rigs, and traditional boomed lateen "crabclaw" sail.
He's now running a lodge with his partner Julie - go stay with them! www.waimalodge.co.nz