Part 3: Regatta day!

Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5

“Indy” the Border Terrier, just making sure that I’m on the job and doing it right, he’s the shop supervisor and gets chewing rights on any interesting small blocks of wood.  There weren’t many when I built Offcuts!

What a blast, the day deserves a story all of its own.  Meeting friends on the beach, sending people out for a row in Offcuts, all five and a half feet of her carrying two people (no one fell out, she is better than you’d expect for such a small boat).  I picked up my friend Nick Miller from the beach and took him out for the under 20 ft class race and, although the much more maneuverable small boats pushed us over the line at the start, we had enough pace upwind and down to overtake most of them. I think we would have been about 4th or 5th out of maybe 30 entrants by the time we had done the race out around the island, up the estuary and back to the start.  Spook is quicker than I thought, not bad for a near replica of an 1860s boat, gaff rigged and not at all sailing at her best yet.  Very satisfying!

I sailed around the anchorage until I found my friends Emma and Blair.  With Emma's daughter Amy on board they were enjoying the regatta in their beautiful classic Townson 26.  We had a shared dinner and a good chat. Emma is a recent arrival from England and Blair drives big ships for a living, sailing is a real treat after a 25,000 ton oil rig construction ship and they are both really interesting people.

At the Port Townsend Wooden Boat Festival the year before I’d been chatting to Lin and Larry Pardey, although they live on an island not far from this regatta we only seem to come across each other at shows and we’re both frantically busy then. They’d invited me to visit “sometime”, so early on Sunday morning it was up anchor, a sail up the river on the incoming tide to the little town of Warkworth for an ice cream and a bit of a look, then back out into the deeper water for the run up to Kawau Island hopefully in time for an evening visit.

Ready about!  Tacking the little gaff sloop  in very calm weather,  although the river is wide here and the tide well in the channel is narrow and it pays to stay well inside the markers.

It was a good sail, a strong quartering tailwind that died away just about as I arrived, and I had just enough of a breeze to ghost into North Harbour and drop anchor in a quiet corner of this tiny harbour.

There are lots of interesting boats resident here,  some very cheap but much loved, some well-maintained veterans and a couple of stunningly restored classics,  it’s a interesting place, well sheltered and very pretty,  as always I was glad to be at anchor.

I rowed Offcuts in to a little boat ramp at the Pardey’s home on the point, carried the 45 lb boat up above the high water line and walked around to the house.
We had a great time, a couple from a very nice Laurent Giles Dyarchy replica came in and the 5 of us had a very nice evening which went on quite late.

When it came time to go back to Spook and my bed, there was no sign of Offcuts where I’d left her, and I can only surmise that one of the several squalls that had come through had blown the light little boat off the seawall and away. Walking through deep mud at high tide, stumbling over oyster encrusted rocks in bare feet soon got tiresome, so rather than wake my hosts I found my way back to the dock, peeled my clothes off and stowed them in Larrys wood rack and swam out to the boat.

When I was checking Spook over after purchasing her I”d noted that getting back on board should I fall over the side was going to be near impossible, so I’d set up a line with a foot loop in each of the stern mooring line chocks. I was glad of those when I’d swum the 100 yards or so out to the boat that night, one of the considerations I’d taken into account was that if I could not get on board, I’d have to have enough energy left to swim back to shore.

I can say that its not easy to scramble out of deep water over the side and into Spook, but its doable.  I need to improve that as its much easier naked than it would be encumbered by sea boots and full wet weather clothing.  That’s a task for this season.

It took a while to clean the muck out of the scratches and cuts the oysters had inflicted on my feet, and a cup of hot chocolate  warmed me up, but I slept well.

Next morning I sculled Spook over to the dock and headed off up the inlet on foot.  Being low tide I had space to walk unlike the night before when I’d been scrambling along the base of a cliff on a totally moonless night, this was easy in comparison.

The view , first thing in the morning.  The deep, powerful cutter on the hard there is Taliesin, Lin and Larry Pardey’s home for so long, circumnavigator, and the subject of many stories on both building and cruising. North Harbour is a lovely spot, and the home of many classic boats, Taliesin is one of the best known of all.

I found the vagrant dinghy, right at the top of the inlet a good 500 yards away. It was a pleasant morning though, I stopped and looked over several interesting boats at cottages along the way, talked to several people, and on the way back accepted a helping hand from a gent who wanted to get out to his boat moored near Spook.  Two of us in tiny Offcuts seemed ok, we still had enough freeboard to stay dry, and he was pleased not to have to wade then swim to where he’d tied up.

Interesting boat he had though,  a “Sealegs” outboard speedboat.  I’d taught one of their design staff at Uni a couple of years before so was pleased to see the results of all the good work in everyday use.

Next: A schedule to keep

John's Plans are in our Duckworks Store.