We have been back in New Zealand for over a month, doing a host of jobs large and small to get ALIESHA ready for sea again. The longest job was applying the antifouling paint, three coats with at least a day between each. Well, it really knows how to rain here, and we needed 14 days to get those three coats on! It wasn’t all bad news though, as we used the wet days to create our new website.

The old site was developed and managed by Steve, our son-in-law. Now he has the additional responsibilities of being a parent, we knew we had to take on the webmaster’s work ourselves. The trouble was, Steve designed the site from his perspective as an IT professional, one who speaks HTML like a native. We took one look, said "no way can we master that technology" and set about building something in Microsoft FrontPage™. It’s a bit basic but we can update it ourselves whenever we can connect our laptop to the world wide web. We hope this means more frequent updates, smaller in length and with more pictures, embedded in the text. We have also found a way to include maps and charts of our travels, which should save you from getting out the atlas.

Steve, a big "thank you" for all you have done for us these past four years.

We launched ALIESHA on the 15^th July and set about embarking sails and stores, while fitting the newly repaired compass. We think she has never been in better shape, as we have used the long period of the refit (two solid months before we visited England, plus the time since our return) to tackle everything which was in need of attention. Time and the ocean will soon reveal the weaknesses we missed.

The plan now is to sail up to Opua in the Bay of Islands, taking a couple of days for the 80 odd miles, to play ourselves back in to this sailing game and to try out all the gear. In Opua we can fix whatever needs fixing, buy duty free fuel and booze and top up with fresh provisions while we await a weather window for the 1100 miles back to Fiji.

It is mid-winter down here in the southern hemisphere and the depressions roll across from the Tasman Sea with hardly a break. We need to see four to five days of winds from the south or west, preferably not too strong, so as to get well north and back into the tropics. Warm sun, blue seas, it has been a long nine months away from these things and we are keen to return there. But we are prepared to wait for the right conditions. So far this season, eight yachts have been abandoned by their crews while making the passage north to the sun, luckily with no loss of life.

We shall be sad to leave Riverside Drive Marina.  We have made many friends among the Kiwis who work in the various businesses attached to the marina and which support the cruising yachties.  Sad, too, to say good-bye to Whangarei.  It's a busy working town and we have got to feel at home here.  Perhaps one day we will return.

We’ll write again when we reach Fiji.

Kia Ora from New Zealand.