A few days before Christmas (I know, I'm behind on the blog) we set out to move the boat south to Whangarei. We had a forecast for nice weather with fair winds and although the entire trip is only ~60 miles, we dawdled and took 5 days to get there. There are many beautiful anchorages between Opua and Whangarei which we hoped to take advantage of. Our first stop was a very snug little cove called Awaawaroa Bay on Moturua Island. This was a pretty spot and well protected so I decided to slip in the water and scrub the boat bottom. To my surprise, the water was thick with little jellyfish in a wide variety of shapes and sizes. Fortunately, they were not stinging me, but unfortunately they got sucked into our raw water strainers for the engines and had to be cleared out at the next anchorage.

The next stop was a super cool cove called Whangamumu Harbour which was hidden behind high rock promontories and inaccessible by land. Here there was an old whaling station from the 1800's. The whalers would row out for miles in long boats, snag the whales in giant nets as they passed by, then try to slay them with hand wielded harpoons and drag them back to the cove for rendering. It was very dangerous and not uncommon for the whale to win. The picture above shows our dinghy in front of the ramp used to drag the whale ashore and Bangorang in the backdrop.

From here we continued further south to Sandy Bay in Whangaruru Harbour. Another nice anchorage from where we explored by dinghy and bagged several geocaches.

Finally the weather started to threaten so we made our run to Bream Head and around the corner to Whangarei harbor. From here it was a 12 mile trip up a narrow river channel in the rain. Towards the end we were running in water only about 8 ft deep and just before the marina in Whangarei we had to navigate the Hatea River Bascule bridge which is shaped to look like to giant fishhooks. More on that and Whangarei in the next post.