Michael! Yup, Michael. We all went to the Kawau Island "Music at the Mansion" wine and music festival on Saturday. It is an annual fund raising event for various charities on the island of Kawau in the Hauraki Gulf. This year one of the charities will replace a few of the optimist sailing boats on which kids learn how to sail. We liked that a lot.
The festival was packed. We arrived by dinghy early to the Mansion House Bay about a mile away from where we were anchored in Bon Accord Bay. We wanted to get a good shady spot to set up our blankets and chairs for an afternoon of people watching, eating, drinking and listening to music. They had a silent auction, vocal auction and lots of various raffles and prizes. Our friends Sandy and Rankin from GypseaHeart were also there.
The best part was when they announced the best dressed man and woman at the event. One of the volunteer directors had made the selection and picked Michael as the best dressed man. So he runs up to the front and the MC on the stage asks, "who's the best dressed man?" Michael says, "that's me." He laughs and says, "Ya, right. Who's the best dressed man?" The woman who selected Michael said, "it's him" (pointing to Michael.) Now the announcer on stage is a bit humiliated. But the good news is, Michael won a bottle of champagne and a chocolate heart given to him by Lin Pardey. For all those into the cruising and boating world, they will know the names Lin and Larry Pardey. They wrote many books and articles.
We enjoyed a fun day and safely made it back to "Astarte" and the noise of the 150 plus boats anchored there. Boats were everywhere as they were having a big event at the Royal New Zealand Yacht Squadron house nearby. A "band" was playing (badly) and people were hooting and hollering and having a great time. Sleep would be slow coming on this night!
On Friday night, we did a fun dinghy raft up in Bon Accord. We met some great kiwis – Lisa and Martin aboard the sailboat "Streak." They told us one of the races from Auckland was supposed to end at 1900 (7 pm) in front of the Kawau Boating Club and that the finish should be crazy. It is a race with no official start time but rather an official end time. The boat that crosses the line closest to 7 pm wins. We thought it would be fun to anchor the dinghies all rafted together near the finish line to watch. So we packed snacks and drinks aboard and went out. Before long we had more boats joining the raft up to see what was going on. We met some interesting people and had a fun night. The finish line had moved so we were in the wrong place – but we had loads of fun nonetheless.
We are now back in Auckland at Pier 21. We had a boisterous and fast sail back from Kawau. It's been good for Susan, she's had various experiences sailing. Some slow drifting sails, some motor sails and a boisterous one.
Now we will be land tourists visiting some of the sights of Auckland...doing some shopping and dining.
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At 2/14/2016 3:54 AM (utc) S/V Astarte was located at 36°50.54'S 174°45.10'E
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