How do you feel when your WIFE out fishes you again! , How we collect rain water on the boat..Ep26

We enter Whangamumu Harbour in fairly confused seas and are relieved that the harbour itself is relatively calm and protected. On the north western harbourside, we visit an old whaling station where we see native vegetation growing over and through various boilers and other metal structures and the vats where they boiled up the whale fat. The oil from the fat was used for lights both here in NZ and exported back to Britain. They caught between 10 and 50 whales each year by herding them through the narrow entrance to the harbour. Although its unthinkable now to catch whales, it was part of the culture back then. While at the old whaling station, we find some walking tracks and walk up to a series of small waterfalls with lush vegetation surrounding them. Some other tracks take you to a lookout where you can see all the bays on the easy coast of this peninsula. Another walk goes over to the other side of this peninsula into the bay of islands. Here we met 2 bushwalkers who told us about the unmarked track onto the Whangmumu peninsula. We do this walk another day with our new south african friends Pete and Karin from Moondust and enjoy the challenge of scrambling up a steep bank. We walk across a very narrow and steep isthmus and watch the ocean crashing 70m below us. Russ does one of his famous face plants into the spongey grass. We take the dinghy to the entrance to the harbour where the waves are crashing onto rocks in the hope of catching a kingfish and although we don’t achieve that objective, we do catch some nice sized snapper. Russ shows how he fillets the snapper we catch, so the fillets are ready to eat (contain no blood vessels, bones or skin). It rains so hard we make a simple rain harvesting system with a bowl from Bunnings and some hose fittings. Its a real bonus to be able to collect rainwater on a boat because although we can make water with our watermaker the four filters need to be changed every few weeks and cost about $30 each. To ensure we don’t get dust and dirt from the boat in our water tanks, we wait until rain has washed the boat off and then connect the hose to the water tanks. Margy shows us how she pulls the anchor up. To aovid some big weather we sail into the famous Bay of Islands and anchor up at Urapukapua Island which we’ve been wanting to see for ages. The weather was wild with up to 45 knots one night – a night of very little sleep as we watched our anchor while the winds were particularly strong to ensure we didn’t drag our anchor and end of on the rocks. Margy kayaked to lots of bays to admire the beautiful coastline and walked on the many marked tracks. The island is a bird sanctuary and so has loads of birdsong at all times of day.