Today, we motor sailed to Tutukaka Harbour and anchored in a very sheltered bay. The location looks lovely and there are quite a few local plus some international boats anchored here. We had to motor sail as there was very little wind. The day was very gray when we left the marina this morning, but had cleared a little late in the afternoon.

We managed to get to the anchorage by 4:30pm and so I decided to wipe down the cockpit enclosure with bleach to help keep any mould at bay. I spent time at the marina cleaning the deck and cockpit so it is looking good. The only thing that looks dirty is the canvas enclosure and so I want it to look good before Neil's family gets to view the boat and I also want to leave the boat as clean as possible before Echo Echo gets left in Tauranga.

While sailing down to Tutukaka, we were called up on the radio by the boat Erica. They are one of the boats that have just completed their circumnavigation. They introduced themselves and said they too were also going to Tauranga and hope to meet up with us when they get there. They are spending a couple of nights in a bay and will arrive one or two days after us.

It is not hard to know I am not in the tropics anymore, as I am wearing warm clothes, I had a blanket wrapped around me for most of the day and we had penguins swimming past us as we motored along. There are an amazing number of birds on the water and it reminded me of the many flocks we saw on the ICW on the east coast of the USA. There are only appears to be a few varieties of birds, but there are hundreds and hundreds of them.

One annoying thing is that even though we are in a first world country and only 50 miles down the coast from Opua and can see homes and a marina in this bay we have no cellular or wifi internet. So back to using the HF radio for my blogs.

Tonight, I will cook some lamb chops which we haven't had for ages and we might watch a movie. We won't stay up too late as we want to get an early start to head off to Great barrier Island which is a little further than the distance we did today. Let's hope tomorrow we have a blue sky day and a little bit more wind, so we can have the engine off.