Round North Island - Great Mercury Island to Tairua

We thought we may have stayed a few days at Great Mercury Island, and as beautiful as it is, after rolling about for the night we changed our minds and thought we would head off for Whitianga. The plan was to pop into the marina there for a night and go to the supermarket to restock supplies. According to google maps, it had a fairly big marina, there was a decent sized supermarket near and the street the marina was just off was called Owen Street, so no brainer.

We headed off from Great Mercury Island, I got on the phone to call the marina to make sure there was no issues with depths coming in etc. Well that easy task was a mission in itself, no one answered the phones there for AGES. We looked up the charts to work out tides and figured we would anchor out by the harbour entrance to wait for high tide and hopefully for someone to answer the phone.

Whitianga Heads

As we dropped anchor the phone was finally answered and they informed me they were too busy and there wasnt even a visitor berth we could go to, GREAT! The lady told me I had a couple of options one head for Tauranga (only 60 nautical miles away) or two Tairua .... Tairua, I've never heard of it.

Turns out Tairua is a little town not far off Whitianga, cool not too far away then (15 nautical miles)! The lady gave me the number and I got back on the phone. The marina answered straight away, told me they could take us and informed me we better get in on high tide. We checked the charts and did the sums and figured we would make it. So on went the motor and up went the anchor and we where off.

Owen Googling Tairua

On the way we thought we would check where we had just booked into. It looked cute and even better there was good diving close by at a place called the Alderman Islands and they are calling it "The Poor Knights of the Coromandel"... and theres a local dive shop... I wasted no time in calling them to see if they had any trips going and if there was space. The owner Alex answered the phone and told me they where pretty full but she maybe able to shuffle a few things and get us on and would call back. With fingers crossed we turned back to the charts to have another look at this channel into the marina that isnt on the charts, where are we going! The channel looked shallow and according to google theres a big sand bar (thats not on the chart) hmm maybe our fingers should be crossed that we get into the marina safely not that we get a dive!

Houses on the cliff by Tairua

We where making great time and before long we had spotted the houses on the cliff at the heads of Tairua and as promised I called the marina to let them know we where heading in. Alex from Tairua Dive & Marine called me back and told me they had kicked their dive master in training off the trip the next day and we could come along, YAY!

Tairua Beach

The crazy channel

We crossed the sand bar without issue, in fact it we surfed it in hitting 10knots as the waves pushed us over. Then as we came into the channel we experienced the first of a few very odd sights, there were markers but it was confusing, the first one was both green and red, what on earth do we do here! We tried to check out the ones further in through binos to make and educated guess. We decided to stay close to the beach side and pass with the marker to our port (right call). The next strange sight was the channel is soooo very close to the beach, so close that as we are heading in we had swimmers, paddle boarders and kayakers chilling in the channel that had to get out of our way, its seriously 5m from the beach! The channel is pretty shallow and we had one eye on the depth gauge and the other on the "pedestrians" crossing the channel but we skirted through ok and made it into the dinky little marina!

Read about the next leg of our journey

Dulcinea all on her own in the Marina

Looking back from Tairua Marina to the channel entrance

Some posers