Ready to go

The last couple of weeks have been manic, hence the lack of postings on here.

I think the last posting was just before we left for the trip north to look for a boat so I'll try and remember what has happened since.

We caught the early morning ferry to Wellington with our friends Graham and Sandra as planned and were pleased to be in a large ship and not a yacht as Cook Strait was quite rough with a southerly gale blowing. After a brief stop at a marina in Petone to pick up a few bits and pieces we set off for Whangarei at 10am. It doesn't look far on the map but by the time we arrived there at 9pm we knew we had travelled some distance! Still, it was good to get it out of the way in one go. We stayed in Whangarei in a motel for four nights with a couple of day trips to the Bay of Islands, Pahia, Opua, Keri Keri, Tutukaka etc. All places that we hadn't been to for years with lovely scenery and beautiful weather, all the reasons we want to move up there on the boat. We looked at several boats but mostly they were pretty crappy and not what we wanted. On the Monday we drove down to Whangaparoa and met the broker there to look at more boats then down to Auckland for still more. Again, nothing we would buy. On Tuesday we all drove down to Tauranga for the day and looked at another half dozen with the same result. By now we were getting desperate and wondering if we were doing the right thing by packing up the furniture before we had the boat. On the Tuesday night we started the drive to Napier, stopping overnight in a very nice motel in Cambridge and leaving early the next morning and arriving in Napier mid morning. We only had one prospective boat to look at there and luckily the minute we saw it we knew we had found what we were looking for.

The boat's name is "Irrepressible" which some might think is quite apt! It's a 43ft ketch with a huge owner's cabin with queen size bed down the back and with total accommodation for nine people (we'll be taking reservations in due course). It's got all the smart toys like radar and GPS chartplotter etc so with any luck we won't get lost.

We were booked on the ferry to come home that night but changed that to the next day so we could stay and do sea trials on it. There wasn't much wind but enough to get the sails up and assure ourselves that we could sail it ok and so we made the decision there and then and committed ourselves to buying it.

Since arriving back in Blenheim life has been a blur of activity, packing the things to take on the boat, a seperate pile of stuff to take to Brisbane and the rest to go into storage when the packers come next Wednesday. In between all that there have been people coming to look at the house (the first ones to see it signed up for 12 months at $400 a week on the spot), organising change of address, trying to sell the cars, cleaning up around the place and generally working ourselves into a highly stressed condition. The end is in sight however and all the big jobs are pretty much out of the way and we're almost ready to go.