Happy New Year from New Zealand

Hello to everyone! Wishing you all a very happy new year and let’s hope 2025 is another great year.

We have been busy since I last posted. We have spent some time exploring more of this wonderful country and we have welcomed family on to the boat for Christmas.

Last time we left you, we had just come back from an amazing week in the Coromandel Peninsula. We decided that we would take a trip North up to the Bay of Islands the next week, however the weather had other ideas. Instead, we stayed for a couple of rainy nights with our friends, Donna and Mark on Coral Moon in Opua Marina and then headed back to Whangarei.

The week after, we needed to head down to Auckland. For one, we had to attend an interview at the US Embassy to apply for a B2 visa to enter the US by boat. And secondly, we had to collect our youngest son Vinnie and Ailsa’s mum Judith from the Airport when they arrived in New Zealand to stay for Christmas.

We had two days before they arrived to take a look around the city. It’s a great place. We were impressed with the buildings and the city layout with the views over the harbour. We took the chance to visit the sky tower and have a drink in the bar, 50 stories up with an amazing view of the city and the surrounding area.

I’m also glad to say that we passed the interview at the US embassy and got our B2 visa. This means that we can now go through with our plans to visit the US. More on that later.

Here’s a short video of some of the stuff we saw in Auckland, mostly from the top of the Sky Tower.

After a couple of days, we headed to the airport to meet the family arriving for the UK. It was an emotional reunion!

We hired a house for a few days to allow Vinnie and Judith to beat the jetlag and acclimatise to New Zealand life and we took the chance to show them a bit of Auckland including another visit to the Sky Bar! Vinnie also had the chance to meet up with his old college friend Tom who is working and living in Auckland.

After a few days we headed back to the boat, did some shopping and got things ready just in time for Christmas dinner! Tom drove up and joined us too. It was a lovely couple of days and of course, we all ate and drank far too much, as well as playing the usual ferocious card games.

We have day trips out between Christmas and New Year. The weather here has been fabulous blue sky and about 25 degrees.

We took a drive up the coast from Whangarei to the Bay of Islands and the town of Russell with lots of stops on the way to take in the views and the beautiful coves and beaches.

Vinnie and I walked up to the Whangarei Falls where we were picked up by Ailsa and Judith.

We took a drive to the Waipu caves. We didn’t manage to get far into the caves as we were totally unprepared with our footwear, but we did do the spectacular walk that features in the video above.

Today on New Years Eve we visited the Waipu Scottish Highland Games! Waipu was settled by the Scottish in the 1800’s and this was the 152nd Highland games including lots of bagpipes, tossing the caber, dancing and throwing the hammer. All good fun and in true Scottish tradition, there was lots of rain showers (Scottish mist) but no midges!

And finally, here’s some thoughts about our plans for 2025. it looks like we are going to stay in New Zealand until around April or May and then we shall be heading back to the UK for a couple of months to sell our house. We shall return to New Zealand again around August time and get Azimuth ready to sail back up North. The plans at the moment are to head to Fiji and then spend the end of the year (cyclone season) in Micronesia in the islands, Tuvalu, Kiribati and the Marshall Islands. 2026 will see us head up to Japan and beyond!

We hope you all had a great festive season, and we look forward to telling you more about New Zealand in the next post.

Dom & Ailsa on SV Azimuth.