Hello everybody! We've reached our winter berth and are settling in for a few months. We will be staying in Gulf Harbour Marina about 40 miles north of Auckland, where Evans plans to do lots of boat work and Beth plans to do lots of writing.

New Zealand is the first place where we've encountered the mainstream of the offshore sailing fleet since leaving the Caribbean in 2000 - an estimated 650 foreign yachts cleared into New Zealand for the Southern summer just ending and 800 the year before. With the winter season approaching and cyclone season ending, all the cruisers here have been feverishly working to get their boats ready to head back to the tropics, and the exodus began in earnest this week when we finally got a stretch of settled southerly winds. We're the exception, hunkering down for a New Zealand winter instead of sailing north in search of warm weather and coral lagoons. By making landfall on the North Island from Tasmania, we were able to meet up with a number of good friends we last saw several years ago, either in Chile or in the Caribbean, before they left for the tropics. They've been sailing west; we've been sailing east - and here we meet.

New Zealand has also become the adopted country of a number of other yachting friends, and we were able to visit with some of them as we worked our way south toward Auckland. We met up with Diana Simon in Whangarei where she and Alvah have bought a cute cottage set in rolling hills within sight of the sea. Alvah wrote NORTH TO THE NIGHT about their experiences wintering over in the Arctic aboard their steel sloop, and we became friends when he and Diana were living in Maine. Alvah was delivering a boat from Australia when we were there, but we had a lovely evening with Diana and Halifax, their stately tortoiseshell cat who helped keep Alvah alive through that long, dark, cold winter. She has been enjoying a life of ease in her country retirement, though the white tips on her black ears - the result of frostbite - hint at her adventurous early days.

We also spent some time with Lin and Larry Pardey, well-known sailing icons who have been writing and cruising for almost four decades aboard engineless, wooden boats. We dropped in on Mickey Mouse Marine ("a division of 3M") as they call their small boatyard on Kawau Island about two hours north of Auckland. Kawau has no roads, only logging trails, and the houses are all accessed from the sea via water taxis or private motorboats. Lin and Larry have taken a derelict "batch" - the Kiwi term for a small cottage without electricity or running water - and when they weren't out cruising over the last few decades, turned it into a livable, open plan beach house with more improvements yet to come. Kawau's seventy or so permanent residents have watched their island become a Mecca for the high-flyers from Auckland, and in the summer the population swells to several thousand.

New Zealand has enjoyed a tremendous period of prosperity and growth since we were here last, driven in part by the booming world economy but mostly by the America's Cup and the advent of a world class film industry that has brought you "Lord of the Rings," "Whale Rider," and "The Last Samurai" among others. The population has grown from three million to four and become much more diverse in the last decade with immigrants from the South Pacific islands and Asian countries. Auckland has gone from a sleepy small town surrounded by apple orchards and sheep farms to a bustling small city surrounded by upscale suburbs.

But perhaps the most striking change is in the way New Zealand treats its indigenous population. When we were here last, a huge gap existed between the white and Maori populations with respect to education, infant mortality, longevity, and just about every other measure of health or social welfare. Today, though, the Maori have become a political force to be reckoned with, proud of their culture and heritage and willing to fight for what they perceive to be their rights. The gap has closed on wages, mortality, and health statistics. There are a number of Maori MPs in the parliament, and they have enough clout to cast the deciding ballots in any confidence vote against the government. Such large changes could not come about without there being winners and losers, without some on each side wanting to go back to the past. But New Zealand seems on the road to achieving what Australia has not yet managed - what no other Western country has managed - they have begun to integrate their aboriginal population into the very fabric of the country's daily life and to raise them to the economic level of the white Europeans. The road may be long and bumpy, but they're fully embarked upon it. In light of all the mistakes in Iraq, we very much admire what they have managed to accomplish.

Stay safe and stay in touch, Beth and Evans s/v HAWK