New Zealand Landfall
Soon after daybreak, 31 st October. A ghostly line rides the swells on the far horizon. The end is quite literally in sight.
Before long the landscape has a shape. As Noon approaches, we enter the outrageously beautiful Bay of Islands. For the first time, our voyage feels real in its entirety, instead of rooted in the present. We are all overwhelmed by the emotion of arriving here in this uplifting landscape after crossing half of the world’s oceans to get here.
There is a dreamlike quality about the moment, a hesitation in accepting perception, an uncertainty, a lack of confidence in my waking state. After so long dreaming, so much preparation, such an irrevocable change in our lives, after so many landfalls, so many departures, after the vastness of the ocean in all her moods, can this really be our goal?
The bay is calm and sheltered in the offshore breeze, yet I have to clear a little sea spray from the corner of my eye.
Reality returns soon enough with a radio instructions from Opua Customs directing me to the Quarantine dock.
“Yer can’t missit Mate. Just tie up under the big yeller sign with a Q on it”.
That sets the alarms ringing. Over the last couple of years we have learnt the hard way that, when entering strange ports, directions including the phrases “you can’t miss it”, “piece of cake”, or absolutely anything that begins “Just ….” are reliably followed by humiliation if taken at face value. Within minutes of hearing these portentous words, you can expect to run solidly aground, have your prop tangled up by a stray line in the water or to have wildly misjudged a 5 knot ebb current running through the confined spaces of the marina you are entering.
We have returned to the First World. It really is as simple as the man said. Hundreds of feet of Q - dock with simple access. Efficient Customs and Immigration who have a major bio-security task to perform, yet manage their formalities with less fuss than anywhere since Europe. An hour later we are cleared and docked inside the marina.
We step ashore to find our Norwegian friends 3T, who departed 120 miles ahead of us in their S&S 60 and have made the cut before the weather turns really spiteful as well. I finally understand the true meaning of ‘euphoria’.