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We left Great Barrier Island and made the mistake of going through the Coville Channel to Great Mercury Island with the tide opposing about 25 knots of wind. This thin bit of sea between Great Barrier and the Coromandel peninsula has swift currents an…

We left Whangarei in relatively calm seas with hopes to spend a night at the Mokohinau Island group.  I had heard the diving here was good, but too many weeks at a dock spoiled us for calm waters and it was way too rolly here.  We moved on an…

Time here at the dock in Whangarei, New Zealand is keeping us busy completing projects that were impossible to do in the undeveloped areas we covered over the last year.  Each day we whittle away at the work list and some items get completed…

    After leaving the Bay of Islands we headed south and stopped in several nice places with funny names like Whangaruru and Tutukaka.  We enjoyed calm bays, nice views, blue penguins and several spinner dolphin escorts.    …

The first stop after leaving the marina at Opua was the town of Russell which was the first capital of New Zealand.As one of the earliest settlements in New Zealand, Russell and the surrounding areas have a rich and colourful history. While Abel Tasm…

We had a pretty good 7-day passage over what can be a nasty trip.  We had two bumpy days followed by two wonderful days of flat seas and no winds and three days that were a mix of average to low seas as we neared the coast.  Several boats b…

Tonga sits on such a longitude to have given it the honor of being the first nation to welcome in the new millennium. Tonga is also the only Pacific kingdom. The local tourist board will try to convince you that theirs are the Friendly Islands, but thi…

Ha’apai is much like Vava’u only much more remote.  The villages here are farther apart with fewer villagers and many of the atolls are uninhabited.  We continued to see humpback whales and took more pictures.  It is hard to explai…

The Vava’u archipelago rises out of the sea, uplifted from the sea floor by tectonic plate movement, as ridges of limestone. There is seismic and volcanic activity along the entire Tongan island chain that sits on the edge of the Pacific ‘ring of fire’…

The Kingdom of Tonga is the only South Pacific country that was never colonized by a European power. Tonga is a constitutional monarchy based on the British parliamentary system. The King however, does have quite a bit of power. He appoints the prime m…