On Sunday, we attended Mass at the nearby Catholic Church, and when we arrived back at the dock we found an old friend, Claude Smith, whom we had met previously in Fiji and Vila when he was cruising on his boat, Nessie II.“Looks like you’re having a rough time on this wharf, ” he said. “My mooring over there is free now. How would you like to use it?”This was a Godsend to us. He jumped on board and helped us tie up on the opposite side, close to our favourite shops. There was always movement in the basin, with yachts coming and going. As Christmas was near and the weather hot, there were many holidaymakers thronging the walkways in front of us. We liked to sit in our cockpit and watch the passing parade.On Christmas day, Pierre awoke expecting to see snow, for he’d read about it in a book and expected snow for Christmas, so his Daddy had to explain that New Zealand did have snow, but that it only occurred in the South Island which had high mountains. We spent the day quietly and opened our presents at our tiny Christmas tree in the cabin: a rattle for André, a book on drawing for Pierre, a Maori sarong for me and a rigging knife for the captain. Harold and Pierre had mixed up a bottle of Ponche de Crème, and we had it with a tinned Dundee cake I had bought way back in Trinidad just for this occasion.As I looked at baby André, I realised that, had he not come along, we would have been in South Africa for Christmas, and home by the following May. Home…the word seemed as distant as the place, but I would not have had it any other way. André was such a joy to us all.Before leaving Trinidad, a good friend and supporter of the voyage had given us a sealed envelope with something inside. He had said, “Use this only when you have something important to do.” The generous gift came in very handy, for we had to haul out the boat to paint and replace a worn propeller bearing, which we deemed very important indeed! We hauled the boat at Alan Oram’s boatyard, half a mile down river, and started on our repairs. The anchor windlass had to be sent to an engineering shop, sails had to be stitched, injectors checked on the engine and an endless number of other jobs needed to be done.I obtained a temporary teaching job as a French teacher at Whangarei Girls’ High School, and this helped a great deal to buy food for the family. I took André every morning to a nearby nursery in his pram, and then walked on to the school, which was not far away. In the evenings I picked him up and walked with the pram back home. The Maori students often took me for one of them and I made many close friendships.During the haul out, we rented an unfur- nished apartment for the princely sum of twelve New Zealand dollars per month. This was for the benefit of André, who needed bath and toilet facili- ties, on top of which we had to climb up and down a ten foot ladder to get on and off the boat, a diffi- cult task with a baby. The apartment was unfur- nished except for a stove, so we slept on the floor. Luckily the carpets were quite fluffy. I was pleased to see the two kiddies romping about and exercis- ing themselves in the open space, something that was not possible on a forty foot boat. It was on these empty floors that André took his first steps.To fully complete the domestic scene, we should have rented a television set; instead, we had our ship’s radio and, from the town’s excel- lent library, as many good books as we needed, for there was the luxury of bright electric lights to read by! Our landlady, who lived with her husband in a smaller house next door, was very kind, often bringing little gifts of homemade cakes and preserves, but never encroaching on our privacy. We got Humming Bird II off the slip five weeks after she had gone up and, as much as we liked the little house on the hill, we were glad to move back aboard. We were planning to leave in May to sail northward but still had many small jobs to do. In between, we found time to visit Auckland with friends, but we found it much too big and bustling for our taste, and we were glad that we had stayed in peaceful Whangarei.The summer had been idyllic. Day followed day with glorious hot weather, with even the pitch melting on the roads. Graeme and Dorothy Palmer occupied the white house on the river bank, and whenever Pierre was missed, we would be quite sure that he was running about with their children, Paul, Mark and Frances, or sitting with them in their living room, all eyes glued to the tele- vision set. We could not resist their open-handed hospitality, and many evenings, driven from the confines of our small cabin, we would seek the companionship of these warm-hearted people in their home.Pierre had been attending the St Joseph’s Convent School, thanks to Sister Peter Chanel who generously took him in. I was sad to think that once again we would be tearing him away from his mates, so we asked him if he would like to stay in New Zealand and join us later on after his year’s schooling. He thought about it for a while and then said, “That would be nice, but I think I will stay with André.” Thirty years later they would make an epic voyage together across the Atlantic.By the end of April the weather began to get cold, and even the tough, young shipwrights in the yard were wearing long trousers and sweaters. A few days before we left, Pierre’s class, all forty of them led by Sister Chanel, came down to visit the boat, and he entertained them with ice-cream and cake, while showing off his shell collection and the other treasures that he had picked up along the way. One little boy wrote in our visitor’s book: “When you build your boat and you sail it to New Zealand, come and see me. I would like that very much, Pierre. We will miss you.”We left Whangarei on the 8th May, 1971, five months after we’d sailed up the river, and I wondered how we would feel after all the soft living we had enjoyed ashore. Our carefree evenings at the Palmer home had resurrected my dreams of having my own home, a place where I could care for my husband and children in comfort and ease. Before leaving, I had toyed with the idea of staying in New Zealand and letting Harold continue his journey alone. I could meet him on the other side when all the danger was past. I loved my teaching job, I had no desire to continue crossing oceans, and I had the opportunity in New Zealand to settle into a stable home. I had even found an affordable plot of agricultural land for sale. Harold, of course, had no interest in putting our meagre finances into land and property, but he wouldn’t have stood in my way. What use was a home if it didn’t have my whole family in it? So when the time came to leave, I stopped questioning and jumped on board.Harold’s plan was that we would visit Aneityum again on our way westward, then on to New Guinea where I hoped to find some secretarial work to enhance our diminishing reserves. While coasting along the first two days, the wind fell very light, and I suggested to Harold that we put into the Bay of Islands and wait it out.“No way!” he said. “If we go in there, Kura Beale will capture us and we’ll never leave.”
As we cleared the Poor Knights Island and North Cape, a breeze sprang up from the north- west and increased in strength until it was blow- ing a good thirty knots. At once seasickness began to take its toll, and the children and I took to our bunks leaving Harold to do all the work. He had it hard, for our re-designed self steering gear began to break up, and he was kept busy repairing it so that we would not have to steer.Despite the seasickness, I must admit that once we were back on the ocean, sailing away on sparkling waters in beautiful weather, I forgot my worries and my longings for the comforts of land. I sometimes look back, now that André is grown up and living with his family in New Zealand, and muse on how convenient it would have been if I had bought that land. Many years later, when I was visiting him in New Zealand, I went back to visit the area where that land had been. It is now an area with a booming tourist economy, inundated with hotel conglomerates, and it is hard to remember what it looked like back then.