Thankful for an absence of wind, we deftly left our slip at Westhaven Marina around 6:30 am and motored north. We immediately noticed that there were virtually no ferries plying Auckland Harbour which seemed very strange at 7 am on a Tuesday morning (April 25th) until we remembered that it was ANZAC Day. We had only learned about this holiday when we had asked Frank why people were wearing red-poppies like the ones used in the UK to commemorate Armistice Day on November 11th. ANZAC stands for the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps which was formed during the First World War as a part of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force. ANZAC Day commemorates the landing of the Corps at Gallipoli in Turkey in 1915. The intent was to capture the Dardanelles which was the gateway to the Bosphorus and the Black Sea but this was never accomplished. By the end of the campaign, the Turkish still held the peninsula and the loss of life was terrible with the dead including 87,000 Turks and 44,000 men from France and the British Empire. The latter figure included 8,500 Australians and 2,779 New Zealanders (about a sixth of those who served on Gallipoli).

Although Gallipoli may have be a defeat in military terms, for many New Zealanders the Gallipoli landings meant the beginning of the sense that New Zealand was finding a role as a distinct nation, even as it fought on the other side of the world in the name of the British Empire. People use ANZAC Day as an opportunity to discuss not only the remembrance of lives-lost and wars in general, but also what it means to be a New Zealander. The day is a national holiday but it is taken very seriously with shops and hotels closed in the morning and, according to Frank, no entertainment allowed on television before noon. With people not working, the ferries were, presumably, running a Sunday service.

We debated about making a direct passage to Urquhart’s Bay (at the mouth of Whangarei Harbour) which would have had us arriving in the dark of the late evening. However, the sea was pretty rolly with a 2 m (7 feet) swell from the east and little wind. If we were going to have to motor anyway, we decided that we might as well wait until next day to cross Bream Bay when the swell should have subsided. So just before noon, we entered Bon Accord Harbour on the west coast of Kawau Island and aimed for Smelting Cove, where we could learn about the rest of the mining story that we had started during our visit to Mansion House Bay.

Two bottlenose dolphins greeted us and rode alongside as we entered Bon Accord Harbour which always feels like a good omen. The dolphins must have been enjoying themselves because numerous boats were coming and going and there must have been about 75 anchored within the harbor. As we were anchoring on the outside edge of the fleet in Smelting Cove, we noticed many people were boarding their dinghies and going ashore at the Royal New Zealand Yacht Squadron’s dock (although that building, an offshoot of the main club at Westhaven, was closed) and walking around to the Kawau Boating Club next door. It appeared that an ANZAC Day service was being held at the Clubhouse and it was very well-attended. We could see that naval personnel in uniform were involved in raising the New Zealand flag at the end of the dock. If we had arrived a little earlier and known what was going on, we would have attended but we decided not to appear disrespectful by rushing ashore at the last minute.



Kawau Boating Club

By mid-afternoon, the crowd had either dispersed (and many boats were leaving, presumably intending to return to Auckland that evening) or had started drinking at the Club’s bar so we launched the dinghy and rowed ashore. Like everyone else, we tied up to the RNZYS dock and walked past their beautiful clubhouse, known as the Lidgard House after the family that owned it for many years. At the Kawau Boating Club, we chatted with the bar-tender to learn about the ANZAC Service and the Club and had a drink of beer or cider while enjoying watching the boats that were heading home. By nightfall, there were probably only about 25 boats left scattered around the Harbour.



The Lidgard house on Kawau

Before returning to Tregoning, we walked back beyond the RNZYS Clubhouse and children’s playground to the back of a rather underwhelming set of ruins. Part of three stonewalls remained of the smelting house that had served to process the copper-ore from the mines on the south side of Kawau but most of the small site was deemed dangerous and was fenced-off. Only one Department of Conservation sign, which faced the water, revealed that this was indeed the Smelting House Historic Reserve but did not provide any further information. Within the ruins, there were several pairs of newish concrete blocks joined by large wooden beams but these did not actually touch or appear to support the old walls. A little interpretation of the site would have been useful.



Ruins of the Smelting House on Kawau Island (Tregoning is seen through the left window)

Before we went ashore, I had noticed a strong smell of propane while I was sitting in the cockpit reading. Randall opened the propane locker and quickly started squirting hoses, valves, and bottles with soapy water. Eventually, large soap bubbled started to form at the bottom of the valve that regulates the pressure from the tanks as it goes to the solenoid and then to the stove in the galley. No more cooking on the stove until that was fixed. So out came the trusty camping, single-burner ring that we can attach to one of the small propane bottles that we have for the barbecue grill, allowing us to have one-pot meals, hot-drinks, etc. And our plans for visiting Whangarei had to be revised.

A phone-call to the Town Basin Marina secured us a slip for a few nights (we knew they would be full so we were lucky to get that) and we will take the propane hoses, valves, etc., to the chap at the propane-bottle-filling station who helped us last time we needed new fittings. We have an American propane system and many of the New Zealand fittings are a different size so it will be interesting to see what we end up with. Assuming that we can find some way to restore the use of the propane stove fairly quickly, we are actually very lucky that this leak occurred how and not several days into a two-week passage to Tonga.