The passage to Whangaroa was fairly bumpy, but we got there in one piece and only one spew.
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| Beautiful Whangaroa |
Whangaroa is quite amazing, it looks almost untouched and prehistoric. I almost expected to see filming of Jurassic Park happening in the area. The photos we took just don't do it the kind of justice I wish it did! We wanted to top up the fuel tanks and there was a fuel dock listed on the charts so we motored into the harbour to find it. I was up with the binoculars trying to spot fuel and where to go, we finally figured out that the fuel was on the other side of the harbour and turned and putted over there. This was a little unnerving, it looked fairly shallow, the charts said it was shallowish (1.8m - 2m at low tide), there was also a few big piles sticking out the water we had to navigate round. Owen managed to steer us in like a pro and I jumped off to attach the lines to the dock. I was pretty keen to have a look about but we couldn't really leave the boat there, so we started refuelling and I went to find a tap to fill the water, there was no taps to be found anywhere so hoping we could fill up on the other side we left that be. There was a strange man on his yacht that was singing and yelling random expletives near the fuel dock that kept us entertained while Dulcinea filled her belly with fuel.
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| Fuelling Up |
After fuelling we headed back over the the anchorage by the harbour and deployed the dinghy to head over to the town with shower gear, water jerry cans and our rubbish and recycling. We tied the dinghy up and went to find the shower block at the marina and had an AMAZING shower (it wasn't actually amazing in any sense of the word except it was amazing to have a shower and be clean).
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| Township in the distance |
Showers done and feeling more human we went over to the local bar and grabbed a cider and a pizza (if you are ever over there, don't have the pizza, it resembled grease on pizza base.....), none the less we enjoyed our cider and grease bread (ok we didn't enjoy our grease bread) then headed up the road to the little village shop to buy some supplies. We decided to head back to the dinghy and fill our water cans at the marina, one of the locals gave us a filthy look while we tried to fill the tanks and we couldn't work out why, but after a couple of minutes there was a god awful stench coming from the jerry cans and we worked out it wasn't a filthy look it was a questioning our sanity look wondering why we would want to drink the festy water! We quickly emptied the tanks and headed back to Dulcinea full of greasy pizza cider and empty of water.
We motored back out to Ranfurly Bay near the start of Whangaroa to spend the evening. It was absolutely beautiful. Thinking this was probably a great place to fish we jumped in the dinghy again with our fishing rods and headed closer to the rocks, after no more than 10 minutes I thought I had caught a monster! Turns out I had caught the bottom and quickly managed to snap my rod in half, while Owen tried to fix the mess I had made I continued to fish with his fishing rod, caught the bottom again snapped the line and lost the lure. We decided today wasn't a fishing day and headed back to Dulcinea to watch some more Breaking Bad!
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| Pretty Whangaroa |
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