Sailing Taurus NZ

We travelled up to Opua in the Bay of Islands to take possession of ‘Taurus,’ a 12 metre steel Feltz Skorpion IIa, on the 10th of October, and spend a week getting to know her. This trip allowed us to take advantage of a friend’s local knowledge, as he and his partner had chartered a yacht for the week. Somehow the trip up went smoothly, despite the massive weight in baggage we were taking, and we caught up with Elias, the previous owner of our yacht and went through the boat’s contents and systems with him. A long day took an unfortunate turn that evening when we manged to scrape our new (to us) dinghy against some rocks which were covered in oyster shells. These managed to puncture the dinghy — as well as Cara’s feet when she jumped overboard to push us off.

A few days idyllic sailing followed with Peter and Penny, our friends from Dunedin. We spent one night anchored in Waiwhapuku Bay, Moturua Island, and watched three of four dolphins play for hours on end. The next day we set sail for Whangaroa, stopping for lunch at the Cavalli Islands. Both are beautiful spots, and big thanks to Peter and Penny for introducing us to them.

At Whangaroa we visited the local sports fishing club and after a few beers and a very good meal spent the night anchored in Pararako Bay, which is just round corner. Next day Peter and Penny headed back and Cara and I sailed back to Cavalli Islands where we spent the night. Thinking we should check the engine over — no easy task as you have to removed a number of sails, spare dinghy, and various sailing ephemera to access it — we were surprised to find a fair amount of water swilling round the bilge. A pretty miserable few hours followed as we tried various ways to get rid of the filthy water — a sponge on a boat pole, a rag under feet, a hand pump with extended tubing. Needless to say we ended up hot and filthy, and not a little concerned about where the water had come from. Elias had told us that we needed to pump grease into the stern gland every hour or so when running the engine, and empty a tank in the bilge at the end of every day. Thinking we had been a bit slack in this we made sure to do this religiously the next day… only to find water in the bilge again!
Removing the water was pretty straight forward now that we were seasoned pros — though it was still a filthy job, and we discovered that a pipe that took water from the stern gland to the bucket had come loose. So now we knew where the water was coming from, which is always nice if you have to have water in your boat!

We returned to Opua and after a great night out with Peter and Penny in Russell bade them farewell. We now had to get organised for our departure, which was not straight forward. We had a number of containers full of filthy water, but all the bins in the marina were locked so than only marina berth holders could use them. Having no transport meant that there was no way for us to get rid of the containers and dirty rags, and we had to arrange to somehow leave our deflating dinghy on ‘Taurus’ and get ourselves and our bags to shore.. Luckily Tim, who had done the survey on ‘Taurus’ came to our rescue, and we were able to fly back to Dunedin having experienced some great highs (sailing and dolphins!) and frustrating lows (hours spent in the bilge)! Other problems that had arisen were a stripped bolt that held the outboard to the dinghy, finding out that the jib sheets were so short they couldn’t be used to pull the sail around when tacking, and a few other bits and pieces that added up to quite the ‘to do’ list for our return.