Nanaimo Yacht Club
16 Mar 2023 1900h - 2200h
Members $5 / Non-Members $10
midislandrep@bluewatercruising.org
We suspect the typical BCA member, if there is such a person, imagines a voyage to the South Seas perhaps via the Western USA and Mexico. Either during the planning stages or while sitting at anchor in French Polynesia, the thought emerges; “What will we do at the end of all this – or when hurricane season looms?” New Zealand emerges either as an answer to this problem or out of the genuine realization that it embodies better variety, scenery and local cruising opportunities than all those other spots along the way.
Larry Roberts and Mary Anne Unrau say they were drawn to sail there nonstop the first time, by a confluence of somewhat different reasons: They had a daughter studying not so far away at Australia National University in Canberra; retirement happened suddenly as the South Pacific hurricane season approached and good friends invited them to visit them for New Year’s in New Zealand.
New Zealand offers beautiful, relatively sheltered cruising along its north coast as well as in the Marlborough Sound and Tasman Bay on the South Island. The SCUBA diving is astounding and the mountainous hiking trails (or tramping tracks as the Kiwis say) are world class. Many cruisers buy or rent a vehicle and wander about the awesome scenery, while their boat rests in a northern port like Opua or Whangerei.
New Zealand offers something for everyone.
Biography: Larry Roberts and Mary Anne Unrau have been sailing their Waterline 43 cutter all over the world, since they first launched her over 20 years ago. They have sailed more than 120,000 miles, have crossed every meridian, sailed south to Antarctica, north to Spitzbergen, and squeezed through the ice in the North-West Passage. They have sailed the Southern Pacific Ocean, including Australia, the Coral Sea, and New Zealand before heading to Chile and home to Victoria via Honolulu. Mary Anne is the author of a book about their voyages: Around the World with Traversay III.
Note that this club night will NOT be available via Zoom but this presentation may be repeated in a hybrid format sometime in the future.
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