Shortly after 6am, coffee in hand, we pulled up the anchor and motored out of the bay and down the harbour. There were quite a few locals out in small boats, fishing. Typically New Zealand.

Once clear of the harbour entrance (about an hour from the anchorage), we had the main up (one reef) and full genoa and we were making good progress. The wind sat between about 12-14knots, just aft of the beam giving us a nice 7-8knots over the ground. We kept the pace up apart from a few lulls, all the way into Port Abercrombie on Great Barrier island where the wind went fickle. We dropped the sails and motored through the narrow passage and into Port Fitzroy - our planned anchorage. We found a nice spot where we’ll hang out for a couple of days for some of the great walks ashore. For a change, the weather looks quite nice for the coming days, though we are keeping our eye on a nasty system coming next weekend. There are plenty of good spots out here to anchor safely from the weather though.

The ferry is in (see orange boat at the port), and thats where we’ll go to start exploring tomorrow.

Its quite well protected in here - the wind is due to shift form the the north to the south for most of this week. After that, it depends where the storm tracks - so we’ll move to get best protection.