Pulled from Jasons website
Happy December from Whangarei
Tiffany in the park just down from the marina here in Whangarei:
Well I’ve been in New Zealand for about a month and I’m already falling behind on the blog posts. For the most part I’ve just been taking care of lots of little projects for the last couple of weeks making the boat more livable. The engine is back in with two of the motor mounts replaced, a rebuilt alternator and a new water pump. It seems to be running as well as it ever has. I also added 2” of Styrofoam to the walls of my fridge and 4” on the bottom to try and keep it from running 24 hours a day. It’s now running a little less than half the time which means Jason now gets cold beer and fresh veggies when he’s done working for the day.
New motor mounts and cleaned up coupling waiting for my Suzie diesel to go back in:
My newly insulated fridge:
Weekend before last Arek and his buddy Adam drove up from Orewa for the weekend. Arek and Iwona have been living just north of Auckland for the past year spending all their free time working on a free classified ad site for New Zealand: www.ulist.co.nz. Everyone over here uses a site called tradme, which is similar to ebay in it’s fee structure and is quite infuriating. Infuriating enough that Arek has become obsessed with getting the craigslist model running successfully in this country. Well Ulist was talked about, music was played, rum was drunk and catching up was done and in the morning we took off for the Bay of Islands in Arek’s car. I skipped the Bay of Islands when I sailed into NZ last year and hadn’t checked out the northern part of the north island yet. Unfortunately Summer isn’t quite upon us here and the weather wasn’t beautiful, but they rain held as we toured through Russell, Opua, Kerikeri and Waitangi before hitting some glow worm caves and heading back down the Whangarei. The trip certainly whet my whistle. I need to get Bodhran up there before too long and get some good quality cruising time in. It’s been over a year since I’ve had Bodhran out sailing, but I’ve still got at least another month worth of projects left before I get out of the river.
Adam and Arek in Russell:
Russell, the sailing up of the Bay of Islands:
The biggest event of the last few weeks is the arrival of my girlfriend Tiffany just over a week ago. She left snow on the ground in Spokane, WA and after a mere 37 hours of travel arrived in Whangarei ushering in 4 days of the nicest weather we’ve had since I’ve been over here. She’s got her working holiday visa and has been handing out resumes left and right since she got here. She’s got a test shift at Fring’s, the brewpub across from the marina, tonight. So here’s hoping that she gets a job and is able to support me in the lifestyle to which I’ve become accustomed :). If she doesn’t find work, well maybe I’ll just finish up working on Bodhran a bit earlier and we’ll do more sailing. That certainly wouldn’t break my heart either. I’m going to be hauling out for 10 days or so on Monday. After that Bodhran should at least be seaworthy again.
Tiffany varnishing up some of the interior trim:
Visit http://www.jasonrose.com to read more about s/v Bodhran and Jason
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