Sailing in Paihia

I just received an email from a friend who has moved down to New Zealand for a year with her family. Every email I’ve gotten has had the requisite photos attached and a description of where they’ve been on this weekend and where they’ll be going next week.

I may never speak to them again when they get back. Not jealous at all. Nope.

The email does remind me of when my buddies, Murray, Cliff and I, all went to New Zealand and Australia for six months in between years at University. The fact that the University encouraged me to take a year off to reassess my academic goals had nothing to do with going on the trip.

Our first stop was in New Zealand and while we really enjoyed Auckland, we wanted to head to the subtropical end of the country to a place called Paihia. We spent the first four or five days of our trip there and generally made fools of ourselves with the locals. They loved us because we were the first tourists of the season and if we were the class of people coming to visit the area, the locals were going to make a lot of money...

As we were heading down the road to catch a bus to the next town, Murray and I spotted a guy on the beach setting up catamarans. Having a four day (which equalled four hours) sailing course from high school under our belts, we decided that there was enough time to go for a quick sail before we hopped on the bus. Cliff thought we were idiots and cutting things too close. Then he told us we were idiots and that we were cutting things too close.

Mur and I dumped our backpacks on the beach and paid for an hour sail. The breeze was coming off the beach and heading out into the bay, so once we had our lifejackets on, we gave a bit of a push on the sailboat and off we sailed, out into the Bay of Islands.

It was dead easy. The wind was blowing steadily out to sea, the sun was shining, our pale Canadian skin had turned from lobster red to a nice brown tan over the last few days and we were on a sailboat on the other side of the world. What could go wrong?

About half an hour later, we decided to turn back to catch the bus. Murray was at the tiller and I was chilling at the mast. We tried to turn left with little success, then we tried right. Hmmm, those four hours of instruction we had really didn’t cover our problem. We took stock of what we had on the catamaran: shorts, shirts, life jackets. No food, no water, no cover.

“How far is it to Vancouver?”  I asked. “The sign on the beach said something like 11,100 kilometres” Murray replied. “Okay. Best we make an effort to turn this thing around soon. How do we do that?” I said.

“Good question” my partner replied. A longish silence ensued.

I could describe the conversation we had regarding how well we paid attention to our sailing instructor and which way to push a tiller to get the boat to move in the direction we wanted. Or why Murray wasn’t paying attention when we were learning the “tacking against the wind” part of the course, but I won’t. This is a family column. Suffice it to say that conversation lasted for the two and a half hours it took for us to make it back to the beach.

I won’t even bore you with the description of our run to the bus station, with sunburnt shoulders and a backpack packed for six months, or seeing Cliff waving to us from the back seat as the bus drove by us. All I can say is that we were young, we were dumb and having the time of our lives. It couldn’t have got any better.