Day One - Chasing the Night

It has been a few years since I have been aboard a packed trans-oceanic bound 747 but I had promised Kris this trip to the ancestral home of the Kiwi for her birthday. Being one of those birthdays with a trailing zero (I won’t mention which one) I wanted it to be memorable. Thus the 13 hour flight to Auckland out of Los Angeles was to be tolerated even if downright dreaded. Surprise, surprise… Air New Zealand personnel were incredibly friendly and their 747 seats were far more comfortable than those early days when my painful flights to Riyadh aboard Saudia Air where the port side of the plane was smoking and the starboard side was non, were seemingly unending. As the title of this missive hints, we left LAX at 9:30 PM and chased the night across the Pacific Ocean for thirteen hours until arriving in Auckland, New Zealand in pitch black at 5 AM local time. Our former boat neighbors from Marina del Rey, Rick and Judith Turrell graciously picked us up at that un-Godly hour, took us home to Judith’s parent’s farm where hot coffee and a warm welcome from her folks Ray and Ann awaited us. Rick and Judith left Marina del Rey nearly seven years ago, cruising their sailboat, Dreamweaver,” down the coast of Central America and throughout the South Pacific before turning into landlubbers just a few months ago. After years of sunshine, pristine beaches and abundant reefs, a long string of storms and a harrowing loss of their mast “took the fun out of it” as she explained to us. They are easily adjusting to the bucolic life of gentleman farmers.

After an hour of catch-up gossip, we tramped out to the back forty and picked two five gallon buckets of wild mushrooms. The ensuing breakfast of wild mushrooms, lightly sautéed and slathered over hot toast, filled up the four of us and we took off for a short tour of the downtown Auckland bayside harbor area. Boaters are invariably drawn to waterside venues and Auckland’s famous Hauraki Gulf has been the sight of some spectacular America’s Cup races, so it was a natural draw for me. Those other three were amazingly patient while I drooled over NZ 32, one of the Cup boats and Michael Fay’s infamous 133 foot sloop that lost the Cup race to Dennis Connor’s monster catamaran way back in the 20^th Century. The biggest surprise was the wicked surge in the central mooring basin. Watching the various boats rock and roll, I decided I would not want my boat berthed here.