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| ANNA, mid-ocean, South.Pacific, on final approach to New Zealand - photo courtesy: NZ military recon and SAR aircraft, Orion - who kept an eye out for us on their runs between the Minerva Reef, off Tonga, and NZ. We communicated our status with them via VHF radio (ship to plane). |
UNREMITTING INTENSE FRONTAL SYSTEMS held Anna to the leeward of New Zealand's far north region where weather patterns were predominantly accommodating: unusually sunny and dry, and without the frequency of troublesome gales and storm systems that we have a knack for ending up in. We had originally intended to spend the first three months of our six month New Zealand visitor visas exploring the far north of New Zealand before continuing up and over the top of the North Island and running down the west coast to the South Island, for the last three months. But an atypical wave of persistent, strong, fast-moving westerly frontal systems had steamed across New Zealand all summer long and set us up with a series of limited good weather windows; none of which lasted more than two to three consecutive days before being followed up by gale- to storm-force wind and wave action, from the wrong direction, for the next three days. This is a problem somewhat unique in coastal navigation along the west coast of New Zealand's North Island, where for a full-keel sailboat like Anna, there is no safe access across shifting sand bars to a safe shelter along this five hundred nautical mile stretch of lee shore. In a nutshell, Anna required five days to make the non stop passage from the far north to the South Island; we never saw more than three favorable days in a row before the next weather event occurred.
Weekly frontal systems and their complex spin-offs occur here with uncanny regularity. It is one of nature's elegant, albeit chaotic algorithms, which in essence describe a recursive function embedded into our global weather patterns. It is a truly remarkable natural phenomenon, yet frustrating for small sailboat trying to get from point A to point B at the wrong instant in time. And for anyone interested in the dynamics of global weather patterns, you can take a peek at Windytv.com and see how these patterns integrate, as they morph and endlessly recur. We use Windytv as one of our weather planning tools when we have Internet access. Windytv displays the GRIB (gridded binary file) output from both the EC (European) and GFS (NOAA) computer-generated weather models. We have found both models quite useful - increasingly more accurate - as long-range planning tools. We have found the EC model somewhat more accurate in its output for short-range, localized projections, possibly because it is a higher resolution model and that helps with localizing weather. Nevertheless, we are talking about mathematical models that are tasked with trying to interpret and interpolate what is often unpredictable (nature's extreme chaos) and that should be kept in mind when relying on mathematical models with ten-day projections of highly complex global weather systems.
If you look at a series of output from any of the global models (say, you download a GRIB file once every six hours), as a frontal system is approaching your area of the world, chances are that each instance in the series over the next 24 hours will look surprisingly different than the previous one. We would expect some difference between runs, but we also would expect some overall consistency in the model output to have any level of confidence in its projections. Models can let us see something forming or growing in intensity (like a cyclone) a thousand ocean miles away, and models can project how that system will develop and where it might be, more or less, at a given point in time, based on a combination of real-time surface and upper air flow, and historical analogues of data that resemble the current conditions. But these are still only projections; it's highly-educated guesswork when it comes to complicated weather system predictions. It's still a broad brush stroke when it comes to pinpoint accuracy. We've been out in conditions we never would have gone out in had that high-confidence forecast got it right. You learn pretty quickly that complex weather is still, pretty much, unpredictable. Very small variations in the paths of distant weather systems can result in inaccurate local forecasts. But thanks to mathematical computer modelling of global weather, we can now at least see a broad representation of what may be coming our way, which definitely helps us to plan a reasonable departure date when setting out on a passage, or determine which anchorage may be best suited for riding out a potential storm. When all the models agree (not something that occurs often), we have a higher level of confidence in what may be in store.
The weather patterns affecting New Zealand this past summer season were considered, by the locals, very unusual, and the professional meteorologists found it significantly less predictable. High-pressure systems were positioned farther to the north of where they usually resided, bringing fine weather to to far north region and gales and more storminess to the south. A westerly flow prevailed for most of the season, instead of the typical easterly flow, which essentially changed the dynamics, for a small sailboat wanting to make an uneventful run down the west coast of the North Island. Had we simply resolved to stay put in the northeast sector of New Zealand's far north region, where the days and nights were atypically sunny and dry and cool; in short, perfect for carefree gunkholing, then it could not have been a more pleasant visit.
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| Anna's neighbors, Bay of Islands anchorage, off Russell, near Opua. |
But for us at least, any pleasant visit, after a long while, needs to be followed up by something which gives contrast; that is, we felt compelled to sail for the South Island, to switch it up a bit. But the weather in southland this season, too, has been somewhat unusual: rather unstable and often stormy, more indicative of a winter-season pattern. Intense frontal systems run unhindered across the Southern Ocean to the south of New Zealand. What helps to keep them at bay, during the summer season, are blocking high-pressure systems. But the highs were sitting too far north to block the intense lows, way down under, in the roaring forties and screaming fifties. So they would hit New Zealand's South Island with a vengeance before weakening, as they worked there way up and across the South Island and continue to the North Island, where the quasi stationary highs would then soften the blow and leave us, sitting in the far north, with what Kiwis like to call "a wee bit of a fine spell", which, as it were, lasted all summer.
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| Casual day sailing, in the easy-going Bay of Islands. |
With two months left before our visitor visas expired we decided to try a series of one- to three-day offshore passages down the east side of the North Island, as the west coast appeared locked out this season for slow-going sailing rigs. This strategy would allow for shorter weather windows because there were many places to wait out unfavorable systems along the way, at least until reaching the East Cape of the North Island. From there it's a different story, as there are only two places that could be used to hide out (the ports of Gisborne and Napier) if truly unfavorable conditions persisted. The disadvantage of an east coast run is that quite a bit more mileage needs to be covered compared to a west coast run, and the last three-day passage, in the east coast series, has to be timed with precision to avoid a hard beat into severe wind, waves and opposing current in the Cook Strait: the occasionally ferocious body of water that separates the North and South Islands. This is a place where air turbulence can be so bad that flights across it are sometimes cancelled until the turbulence diminishes. Large, car/passenger ferries, too, will occasionally cancel a sailing as a result of very large confused seas, in storm-force conditions. It just gets too rough and tough when conditions deteriorate. But, if you get the timing right, in between frontal systems, when the wind and seas are favorable, everything that could turn out badly would surely turn out well.
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| Anna, at anchor in the Bay of Islands, NZ |
And so that is what we would attempt to do: wait for a very well-defined, stable weather window of at least three days for the last leg - direct from the North Island's East Cape area, down the last stretch of hostile coast, and around the corner and across Cook Strait for the entrance to the fjords of Queen Charlotte Sound. Following the weather patterns in New Zealand for the past five months had showed us that if we were willing to wait for favorable systems to occur on the east coast run, say, once every ten days or so, we could make the South Island without incident by mid April if we started our series of passages south, under sail, in March. And that's what we decided to do after finishing up our exploration of the Far North region.
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| Iron Bark, an easy-on-the-eyes, gaff-rigged steel cutter, ghosts out of our anchorage, at Pomare, in the Bay of Islands, in about two knots of breeze. |
And strangely enough, after finally making that decision, we found ourselves realizing that we were actually enjoying the quiet, attractive, very easy-going anchorages in the Bay of Islands, where amenities were close by and convenient. Near Russell, for example, we could anchor out in a gale-force, mud-bottom anchorage, and dinghy in and tie up to an easy access floating dock, and walk an even easier half mile to town where a hardware store, well-stocked grocery, cafe and other amenities could be found. We could safely wait out gale warnings from the odd passing front there, without worry. Once or twice we had fifty knots of breeze for a while in the roomy anchorage, but the anchor was set in the stickiest mud we had ever experienced, and we knew that we were locked in place. The mud was so sticky that when it did come time to weigh anchor it took us a half hour to scrap the mountain of mud off the anchor and clean the chain links. And in fifty knots of breeze we had to turn off the wind generator and, on occasion, the solar panels, because there was simply too much energy coming in and we didn't want to burn up our AGM batteries. In fact we kept up with our energy demands for over four straight months, running off solar and wind without ever needing to rely on an auxiliary source such as the diesel engine, or the portable Honda generator. And when the occasionally stronger frontal system did sweep through, it often brought a heavy downfall of rainwater, which filled our fresh water tanks. So frontal systems weren't all that bad, in fact they were most welcome, as long as we didn't need to get anywhere when they screamed through.
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| Far North: Whangaroa's, hilly, anchorage landscape. |
After enjoying the amenities and protection within the Bay of Islands we headed farther to the north, to the wilder Cavalli Islands and spectacular natural protection of Whangaroa (pronounced Fanga-roa, in the Maori). We stayed there for a week or two waiting to see if we could still somehow find that elusive five-day weather window down the west coast of the North Island, but it simply wasn't in the cards for us this season and so we returned to re-provision in Russell, before heading south on what we expected to be the first of our overnight or multi-night passages, along the way to the South Island via the East Cape.
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| Anna, anchored in the protection of one of the outer finger bays off Whangaroa Harbor. |
The system was delayed by a day or two (the GRIBs and NZ Met Service forecast were off with respect to the exact timeline - not unusual) but when the system did finally arrive we could see the low-altitude clouds moving rapidly overhead and from the northern quadrant - the leading edge of a low-pressure system. But the surface of our anchorage was barely rippled and no ocean swell could enter the cove as we were set deeply inside the protection of a bowl of teal-green water at the base of a range of high, enveloping mountains, which suppressed the wildness outside into a heavy calm. The night brought thunderstorms with lightning that lit up the solar panel charge-controller LED display. It must have interpreted these bright flashes as short bursts of sunlight and turned itself on to regulate the incoming energy. After a few seconds of darkness it shut itself off, realizing that it had been tricked. But the lightning seemed benign, at least from where we were sitting, in the protection of our little, mountainous, one-boat cove. To keep us company in the anchorage were the remarkable and distinct calls of a number of species of nearly extinct birds. Great Barrier Island is primarily a wildlife reserve and mostly uninhabited in the northern reaches and especially during the off season. From our anchorage base we could take our Zodiac into the tiny village of Port FitzRoy, a little over a mile away across flat water, with our little coffee-mill sized 2HP, two-stroke Yamaha outboard. In Port FitzRoy there is a small general store where everything is priced three times higher than food on the mainland, but we were well stocked from our last provisioning in the Bay of Islands and only wanted to purchase some fresh vegetables and fruit and a dozen eggs, which looked too good to pass up.
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| Showery day at our tucked away anchorage at the north end of Port Fitzroy, GBI. |
On a fine day our anchorage provides access to miles and miles of unspoilt walking tracks and tramps, through forests with dark, old growth trees and huge prehistoric ferns and dense prickly brush, embedded with thorny thickets, and sprinkled with clumps of wild grasses. Up and over and down again along the island's ridges and rugged coastlines one could walk for days. And the way we access these wildlands is by Zodiac - from our base on Anna - to where ever we can find a shoreline-access path through the thick bush or forest.
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| Cat treks through the bush and forests on Kaikoura Island, one of the outer protective islands islands, just off and to the west of Great Barrier. |
A few hours later, when we returned, the sun had about an hour to go before setting. but the tide was out and getting the Zodiac back to the waterline posed a greater problem with slipping and sliding and suction. We now needed to move the Zodiac across the mudflat a distance of one hundred feet to the water's edge without getting hopelessly stuck in the muck, until the next rising tide could lift us out in a few hours, after dark, in a thin moon. There was only one solution: we offloaded everything we had in the Zodiac, including the little coffee-mill of an engine and carried it fifty feet down the shoreline, on the harder-packed dry mud, and sharp-edged mussel shells, and unforgiving barnacles - which could slice through the Zodiac's tubes like a hot knife through butter - to a spot where the water met the gravelly beach. We then returned to the Zodiac (which at this point was light as a feather in weight, by comparison) and proceeded to lift it up over the sharp surface of mussel shells and barnacles to where we could launch it, then row over to where we stowed our gear. We then loaded our gear into the Zodiac, re-mounted the tiny engine and puttered away, just skimming over the rising, roily water of the mudflat, with the sharp-edged mussel shells and razor-sharp barnacles. Check the damn tide tables next time - that would be our new mantra. If it happens again, we will name our Zodiac: Never Again II.
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| Traditional tall-rig works its way out to sea, from the protection of Port Fitzroy, GBI. |
What has not come to an abrupt stop is weather. And there is plenty of wild weather to be found in New Zealand. A few days ago, tropical cyclone Cook migrated south, from the warmer tropics to the cooler mid-to-high latitudes of New Zealand so fast that it didn't have a chance to blow its top and lose its energy along the way. And while Cook was no longer classified a tropical cyclone, since it had migrated from the tropics to the higher latitudes to the south, it retained its spinning characteristics and was renamed, simply, cyclone Cook. It seems they now classified it as an extra-tropical cyclone (outside the tropics) and dropped the tropical prefix. The last cyclone to cause real grief to New Zealand - and resembled Cook's track - was recorded in 1968. That cyclone was responsible for the sinking of the Cook Strait ferry, the Wahine. As mentioned earlier, Cook Strait is that nasty piece of ferociousness that separates the North Island from the South Island. The cyclone in 1968 lingered and deepened and battered everything in its path. Cyclone Cook, on the other hand had a significantly different characteristic: it was more akin to a bullet train: extraordinarily fast moving. Once it arrived at the North Island it took less than a day to reach the South Island; it didn't linger. Cyclone Cook crossed Anna's path at Great Barrier Island on April 12.
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| Heavy rains accompany cyclone Cook, which passed close-by Anna, at GBI. |
We were anchored approximately twenty miles from where the GRIB files had forecast the center of the eye. The winds near the center ring were forecast, by the NZ weather service, twelve hours earlier, to hit seventy to eighty knots. And less than twelve hours before that, the GRIBs were projecting ninety-seven knots close by. When Cook actually did arrive, the winds clocked rapidly (in less than six hours) through 180 degrees of clockwise rotation (lows rotate clockwise in the southern hemisphere), from NE to SW, and continuing further around to the NW before diminishing as the eye moved further to the south and west of us. We saw fifty-five knots of wind with no associated swell and an insignificant wind chop in our alternate foul-weather anchorage, at Waiarara, near Port FitzRoy.
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| Our anchorage at the head of Waiaraara Bay, at Port FitzRoy, GBI, where we set up our storm gear for the fast-approaching cyclone Cook. |
The barometer had dropped rapidly on cyclone Cook's approach (from 1026mb to 996mb) within twenty-four hours. We choose this particular anchorage due to its limited exposure to the predicted wind directions based on the track of cyclone Cook, and we were happy that we did. In both of the models that we had been tracking we had reasonably high levels of confidence, and it made our decision to anchor at Waiarara Bay not too difficult. The ocean waves off of Great Barrier Island - outside the protection of our anchorage - were forecast to hit six meters. At the last minute cyclone Cook deviated by about a half degree of longitude from its predicted track (almost directly over Great Barrier Island). It moved about thirty miles farther to the east, and that slight variation in its path was probably why we saw fifty-five knots instead of eighty to a hundred. Anchored out in the direct path of this fast-moving cyclone put us on a very slippery slope for a relatively short period of time. The computer weather models (both the EC and GFS models) that we had been tracking were very accurate this time, with regards to the realities of cyclone Cook. We had tracked the progress of this rogue cyclone ten days before it arrived in New Zealand, and we based our strategy for weathering it out, even before the NZ weather service had picked it up and issued their severe storm warnings.
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| 92-knot wind gusts were forecast for cyclone Cook, which was tracking our way. The eye passed slightly further to the east than the predicted track, saving us from extreme conditions. |
There are very few people or other boats here now, and while it is only fifty to sixty nautical miles offshore of Auckland - a dense and populated place by most standards - it truly feels a world apart in little Port FitzRoy, in Great Barrier Island's northwest quadrant. Great Barrier Island has no reticulated (grid) power.
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| Iron Bark, our cyclone-hole neighbor at Waiarara, GBI. |
The few people that live here utilize solar energy and wind turbines backed up by portable generators to handle their electrical demands. They also catch rainwater. Marine mussel farms are scattered around the harbor. There is a ferry that runs once a week from the mainland carrying cargo and people. The roads for the most part are rough, unpaved, winding and steep-graded with the exception of the narrow sealed tar road that connects the south end of the island with the north. There is a cell tower here that manages, somehow, to supply remarkable (albeit low-bandwidth) mobile, roaming, voice and data connectivity, which is how we download weather data at our anchorage. The outer anchorages near Port FitzRoy are satisfyingly isolated, if not exactly, remote.
Remote, as we have come to understand it, is a relative term that we reserve now for places that we can identify only by a coordinate set, hundreds or perhaps thousands of miles out to sea; days or weeks, a month or possibly more, from any inkling of civilization. A place where, for us, Anna slips stealthily through moving mountains of waves and ocean current, rising to the peaks to catch the steady breeze and fleeting gusts, and settling in the deeper troughs for a few seconds of calmness before repeating the cycle, as day folds into the blackness of night, and night into increasingly more luminescence, as early morning materializes.
Ocean voyaging is sometimes splendid, and it is sometimes rough, too. Regardless of which it is, for us, it is always enhanced by finally reaching an isolated or remote anchorage with perfect wind and wave protection. Right now we are in perfect-protection mode; and it is a compelling, low-key mode to be in. Which is probably why we have been mucking about the outer-island anchorages of the Far North region for so long now, and putting on the back burner what amounts to us, at least at this point in time, as a perfunctory delivery from A to B: six hundred nautical miles that must be left in our wake in order for us to get from Great Barrier Island to the fjords of the South Island, with all the complexities of sailing what could be described, simply, as an unpredictable and occasionally wild ride. We could do it, but we're really not interested in a straight up delivery at this time. Getting anywhere on Anna, under sail power alone, and without the pressure of a deadline is always our first choice, our precept - and of course exploring the southland in some depth, once we actually get there, would require more time than we can presently allot, as our NZ visa runs out late in May.
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| Looking out to sea, from our inner-harbor anchorage, is the entrance to protected Port FitzRoy, GBI, The waves outside the entrance grew to 20 feet, while on the inside, at the anchorage, the swell was nil. |
We've decided to keep Anna in the northland, at least until we can return - especially now, when the season is bringing us more frequent gales and storm systems. We are not ready to take the other option and depart NZ, on Anna, in May, on another long passage. to say, SE Asia, or anywhere else for that matter at this time. The truth is, on approaching the threshold of our seventh straight year of full-time voyaging, we probably should take a break. Which means that for the next year or two we will likely pursue other things that have absolutely nothing to do with the sea, or a fanatic obsession with weather systems on our six.
And to that end, we have recently been offered an unusually economical yet secure moorage, on a double-pile mooring in the protected channel that leads into the inner harbour at Whangarei (pronounced Fanga-ray), about fifty miles northwest of Great Barrier Island, where we are anchored at this time. We can leave Anna there while we switch gears and do something else for a while. We have never left Anna anywhere, long-term, since we've had her (almost twenty years now). So that will be a new experience for us. Most people who do what we do tend to fly home when the good weather season comes to a close, and then return when the weather once again improves, repeating this snowbird cycle every season, that is, every six months or so. But Anna is our true home, through thick and through thin, where ever we have been, and so we have never even considered that an option.
We are not sure what to expect when we finally do leave Anna in mid May, and take to the air - except that for a while, we'll be moving at 500 knots instead of five, circling the world by Airbus and Boeing from east to west, on a different sort of ship. Our first air leg takes us out of New Zealand for London, via China, and back into the northern hemisphere to see our grand sonny boy, Leo, for the very first time - he'll be almost one.
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| We will get to visit happy, happy grand sonny boy, Leo. |
***
We have now lived aboard and sailed Anna
for nearly twenty years, through tens of thousands of nautical miles
covering ninety-five degrees of latitude: from the ice fields and
immense calving glaciers and inside and outside passages of SE Alaska, in
the northern hemisphere, to New Zealand's far northland in the southern
hemisphere, We've visited many of the remote, uninhabited outer islands,
and small, inhabited island nations, too, while
zigging and zagging our way across the vastness of both the North and South Pacific
Ocean Basins, through a multitude of time zones, an international
dateline, tropics of this and tropics of that, subtropical regions,
convergence zones, doldrums, the Equator, powerful La Nina and record
setting El Nino weather phenomena; we've been hit by a direct lightning
stroke, encountered tsunamis, tropical cyclones, ex-tropical storms,
enormous seas, and wild currents. Anna has ghosted along on
countless night passages and, at other times been swept along in
tar-blackness with terrifying speed, past large whales asleep on the
surface of the sea, and through pods of hundreds upon hundreds of
bioluminescent dolphins that resembled criss-crossing, spiraling tracer
tracks, as might be observed in a supercollider image. Anna has sailed through the
night, past volcanic eruptions, which sent steamy, fiery lava flows
cascading down high coastal bluffs, at a glacial pace, directly into the
sea. Whether crossing oceans, or exploring remote anchorages, or on
coastal hops to visit some of the poorly charted nooks and crannies and
jungle rivers of the Pacific, along almost the entire extent of the west
coasts of North, Central and South America, it has become apparent to
us, after all this time, that we are only somewhere just beyond the
beginning of the learning curve with respect to understanding natural
and cultural phenomena. And we could not be more delighted in having
chosen this path.
Rich and Cat
s/v Anna
Rich and Cat
s/v Anna
***
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