Last Stop in NZ, Auckland

Auckland is NZ’s largest city by far with about one third of the country’s 4 million people. It is known as the City of Sails and you can see why looking at the photos on the FLICKR site. Being our last stop in New Zealand we splurged a bit and stayed down at the waterfront in a Hilton apartment. We figured (correctly) that a nice kitchen would pay for itself since you can’t have dinner out downtown for less than a $100. We were on the wharf next to the ferry terminal and only used the car when we ventured out to the zoo.

We did the SkyTower and enjoyed the maritime museum and walked the docks checking out the sailboats every morning and evening. A highlight for Karen and me was sailing on an America’s Cup boat. The boat we sailed on (NZL41) was actually the Japanese entry into the 1993 Cup (the Nippon Challenger). In that series, this boat had a reputation of being one of the faster boats with one of the slower crews. We tried to maintain that tradition. We expected a 2 hour passive tourist sail, but actually it turned out to be a blast flying the genoa downwind and tacking back upwind under the harbor bridge. There were only 4 professional crew, so us tourists (about 20) had to provide power for the winches using the grinding pedestals. I always wondered how these things work and it turns out that it’s a complicated gearing system where each pedestal can be set to provide power to various winches. You could set it up so that all 4 pedestals were powering one winch (e.g. to raise the sail); or they could be split so that 2 were used to winch the mainsheet and 2 were used to control the jib sheet. The crew person at the winch yells commands at the crew that control the winch speed.

Conditions were perfect, the boat would do at least wind speed (e.g. 6 knots of wind = 6 knots of speed). I had the thrill of steering when the boat hit its high speed of the trip of 10.5 knots. Karen and Abby also steered and Karen was one of two folks who volunteered to go down below and help pull the genoa down into the boat. It was a great trip and made us look forward to getting back to our boat.

Our next to last day we had a fun trip to the zoo, bought a last round of Sylvanians for Abby, and I visited a forest economist and talked about some joint research efforts. Our last day was a trip to the maritime museum, a nice lunch next to the America’s Cup yachts and then we loaded our little rental car with all of our stuff and headed to the airport. Other than our folding bike poking its axle through the side of our suitcase and a unexpectedly high penalty for having an extra bag the trip home was wonderfully uneventful. We're in California, Disneyland tomorrow, and then head home Saturday. I’ve added more pictures to the FLICKR site and we’ll still be adding some blogs over the next few days.
Cheers, Bob