Marina fever

It's real - this marina fever!! But we are not succumbing!! Unfortunately we are still in Whangarei at the Town Basin and making regular trips to Auckland to hopefully finally (soon!) tie up matters arising since the passing of Jim's mother early in June. The fact that we are having to deal with the Guardian Trust who have been administering family estates since 1972 certainly isn't helping. The financial losses due to their incompetent management are such that it is better to try and forget them and just get sailing. For this and all sorts of other reasons we can't wait to leave and get out into the deep blue yonder. But we have to wait until the GT debacle is sorted and this shouldn't be more than 2 weeks now. However, we have mentioned 2 weeks before and here we still are!! 

There has been a bright side though. On our trips to Auckland we have been catching up with Gina's family and have spent some time at Heather and Magan's new rural retreat between Tuakau and Port Waikato south of Auckland. They have recently acquired 14 miniature horses which are very pretty to look at but will require a good deal of looking after. We trimmed the fringe of one of the stallions the other day because the poor old chap couldn't see through his mane!

More good news - Jim's youngest daughter Charlotte is expecting their 2nd. child in December as is her school teacher sister, Rozanne! So, from having one grandchild, there will soon be 3!!! December will be quite a month. We'd better be back.

We have also acquired a new camera so, once we have worked out the technical challenges and complexities of transferring images to the computer, we will post some images to the blogsite. They say pictures speak more than a thousand words! It has underwater ability too so perhaps we will be able to show you some pictures of coral and colourful fish once we're where the butter melts.

We are about to install an electronic device (AIS) which picks up signals from any vessel over 300 tons (now mandatory for them to carry an AIS transmitter) and it tells you the name of the vessel, it's current position, course and speed - so we can work out when they will run us down!! Not really, we should be able to call them up on the radio and alert them to our position and get out of their way if necessary. No point in arguing the right of way when they are much bigger.

Apart from the above there isn't really any news of note - we'll let you know when we are leaving so you can all avidly follow our progress!!

Hope this finds everyone well.

Jim and Jean (Gina)