Why Not Sail Around New Zealand?
14 November 2022
• Wellington, NZ
by Karl Coplan
After all, this whole voyage is supposed to be about traveling with minimal use of fossil fuels. So what were we doing tooling around the North Island in a rental car?
My original plan was to try and sail as far south as Christchurch on the South Island, and use that as a base for exploring. When we planned to sail from Tonga, we looked into sailing straight for Wellington, or Picton on the other side of the Cook Strait (once we figured out that Wellington was not a yacht port of entry). But adding five days to the Tonga passage seemed too much of a roll of the weather dice. Though, as it turned out, the weather would have been fine for pressing on to Picton. But my debilitating infected shin would have struck at sea (couldn’t have known that).
But once we got to Opua and looked at the sea charts, road maps, and the calendar, sailing to the South Island made less and less sense. Most of our “must see” destinations were either far inland (like Tongariro, and the Southern Alps) or far from suitable harbors (like the Kaori forest on the inhospitable west coast).
So we would have been renting a car to see these places any way. Tongariro is a four hour drive from the closest suitable port in Auckland - so driving the eight hour round trip from Auckland is the same amount of driving as driving from Auckland to Wellington and stopping at Tongariro on the way, as we ended up doing.
When we looked at our eventual passage to Australia, transiting the Cook Strait between the North and South Islands to head west looked problematic. The Cook Strait is notoriously rough, so we would have to wait for good weather to get through. And a glance at the pilot charts revealed that the wind at the latitude of the Cook Strait almost always blows from the west in December (in our face), while the wind at the northern end of the north island is equally likely to blow from the N or S or E (fair sailing winds) as from the west. So our passage to Australia would probably require sailing back north to Opua anyway. The round trip to Christchurch would have eaten up about two weeks of our time in New Zealand.
Of course, Fjordlands at the south end of the South Island would be pretty cool to visit by sailboat. But the cruising guides all say you should plan to motor all the time in the unreliable wind of the fjords. In fact, Doubtful Sound got its name because Captain Cook sailed up to the entrance and did not go in because he considered it doubtful he would ever be able to sail his ship out again.
So, sailing south would have involved a fair bit of motoring. And the Mabel Rose is not very fuel efficient under power - at best around 12 MPG when we run the engine at the most efficient part of the power curve (5 knots/1500 RPM/ .5 GPH). Our Kia Stonic rental, rated at 45 MPG, does a bit better, and with two people in it, is comparable in fuel efficiency to rail travel.
So the land tour of New Zealand won’t blow my carbon budget any more than a sailing tour would have. I dropped the rental car off at the Wellington airport yesterday, relieved that we managed to avoid any head on collisions in this upside-down-keep-left-on -the-road part of the world. The next phase of our New Zealand tour will be by ferries. buses, trains, and three people sharing a car - mostly comparable in fuel efficiency to sailing down the coast while motoring in and out of harbors.
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