Opua: Wednesday race
Opua: Wednesday race
The air is always clean here. There is no industry and only a few thousand people. A small car ferry crosses the water a half mile north of the mooring, but there aren’t any roads around more than half the perimeter of this end of the bay. The nearest airport is fifteen miles away in Kerikeri and it is a single short runway for the half dozen daily small plane flights up from Auckland. There aren’t even any sheep on the hills. (see last Wednesday’s entry) But the air is clearer and the light and shadows on the hills and water more dramatic just after a front passes. As it did last night, and as it did a week ago when the above photo was taken, showing the fleet leaders heading for a mark beyond an anchored cruising boat. Tonight’s race doesn’t start for another two hours.
Carol should be taking off any minute from San Francisco for Auckland. I will get a rental car and pick her up tomorrow morning at Kerikeri.
In March her arrival coincided with the remnants of a cyclone and her flight up from Auckland was cancelled. Air New Zealand bussed the passengers north. While the storm was no longer a cyclone, strong gale force wind made it impossible to row out to the mooring, so we spent the night in a motel ashore. Some rain is predicted for tomorrow, but the weather shouldn’t be too bad.
One of the defects of iWeb, which I use to create this site, is that it republishes everything every time there is the slightest change. Thus every time I make a new journal entry, I have to upload the entire journal, which now is more than ten megabytes. With the Opua Internet connection, this can take more than a hour. Many people, including me, hope that the next version of IWeb, due out early in the new year, will fix this. But I have been searching the web and may have found the solution. I hope so. I will soon find out.
Wednesday, December 20, 2006