Well, it’s a whole new ballgame. This morning I turned on the TV and was very gratified to hear Dennis Conner saying that he thought Team New Zealand’s NZL-82 was the faster boat, and he gave the exact same reasons that I’d been giving. Today Alinghi seem to have found a reserve of more speed in SUI-64, bringing them up to parity with NZL-82. I was rather surprised. Alinghi caught a very nice shift in the opening 10 minutes of the race, and proceeded to demonstrate textbook tactics in holding off NZL-82 for the rest of the race. Is SUI-64 really as fast as NZL-82 with its revolutionary hula? I don’t think so. I think that the defeat TNZ suffered in race 2 where they were passed on the final downwind leg of the race has seriously shaken TNZ’s confidence. Now we’re seeing the repercussions on the race course. If the kiwis want to hold the Cup, they are going to have to dig deep and find a new strength of character to prevail.

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Yowza! What a race! Alinghi has gone up 2-0 and I’m speechless. Ok, let me go on record as saying that I believe NZL-82 is the faster boat. I think it’s faster upwind, I think it’s faster downwind. I think it’s faster in heavy air, and I think it’s faster in light air. So what’s going on here?? It looks to me that Coutts is the much smarter skipper. Don’t get me wrong, I think SUI-64 is a fast boat, too. But somehow Coutts has this ability to sucker his opponents (he did it against Oracle and USA-76 too) to sail in a seriously suboptimal mode when it really counts. I think that if Dean Barker had stuck to VMG sailing down the last run, possibly gybing a couple of extra times to keep his boat in clear air, TNZ would have won the race and leveled the series.

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Lots more pictures have been posted. They include everything I did when Barry was out here, as well as my trips to Tauranga (for the Around Alone) and Napier, and time spent in Auckland in the week prior to the America’s Cup.

Poor TNZ! A horrible string of gear failures forced them to retire from race 1 of the America’s Cup, after looking like they had better boat speed for the first 10 minutes of the first upwind leg. First they were accumulating a lot of water in the boat, then the tail end of their boom broke, and finally the tack of their genoa ripped out. Alinghi sailed the test of the course alone to score the point.

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Since there was no work for me to do with the Tommy Hilfiger Around Alone campaign, I decided to take a few days in one of the few places on the North Island that I hadn’t yet seen but really wanted to: Napier. Napier was built mostly during the 1930s, and as such is a seriously Art Deco city. I went down there by bus on Feb 5th. After checking in to the YHA, I was relaxing in the main lobby area of the hostel, when I notice that the music playing softly over the PA system wasn’t your standard rock-n-roll or pop music. Waitaminit, that’s “The Dubliners”! Who the hell plays obscure Irish folk bands? Well, it turns out that the owner, Bob, of the Napier YHA used to own and manage Auckland’s only folk music venue (it has since closed - the Kiwis don’t go in for folk music). We sang some songs back and forth for a while. It was a great bonding experience.

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Right, so Rae, Barry and myself piled into the car and set off for parts north. We knew it was going to be a long day, so we got an early start. The drive was uneventful, though we did stop for an hour in Orewa to use an internet cafe and to grab a light lunch. We arrived in Paihia in the early afternoon and checked into the Saltwater Lodge. Barry and I went immediately to a dive shop to find a boat to take him to the Rainbow Warrior. He signed up for a two-day deal, with two dives each day, all in various different parts of the Bay of Islands, one of which was in fact the Rainbow Warrior. Fair enough. On the first day of Barry diving, I took the car and drove up to Cape Reinga. Oy, that was a long day. It was easily 3+ hours each way. The views were nice once I got there and it felt cool to be there and imagine the Around Alone boats going past. One the way back I took a short detour over 12 miles of the worst gravel road I’d ever been on. This let me out onto Ninety Mile Beach, which was fairly dramatic. It faces the Tasman Sea, is fairly wide, almost perfectly flat, and stretches off in both directions as far as the eye can see. When Barry and I met up late that afternoon, we were both too tired to cook, so we went out for a light dinner.

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After Barry and I watched the last race of the Louis Vuitton Cup, we wanted to go around and see some of the North Island. We initially thought that the bus would be the best way, but after trying to catch one from Auckland down to Waitomo it became obvious that we needed more flexibility. Several phone calls later, we had hired (aka rented) a car. I had really been wanting to try driving on the left, so this made me happy. Barry agreed to pay for the car itself and I said I’d cover the petrol (aka gas), as he has a job to go back to and I don’t. Before I go any further, I need to publicly tell everyone that Barry is a great cook. Over the past couple of weeks, he showed a lot of creativity and inspiration under sometimes adverse circumstances (many hostels do not have well-equipped kitchens). If you get a chance, eat Barry’s food.

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Well, we (Barry and Rae and myself) are on our way north to the Bay of Islands. Barry and I were in a Waitomo where we did some black water rafting (a combination of spelunking and inner tubing). Then we went on to Taranaki and did a big hike on the mountain. At the YHA in Taranaki we met Rae who had the same short-term plans as Barry and me. The three of us drove up to the Coromandel peninsula for two days. Now we’re taking a lunch break in Orewa, checking email and hopefully we’ll catch the opening kickoff of the superbowl. We’ll be up in Paihia and/or Urupukapuka for a few days. Barry wants to dive on the Rainbow Warrior and I’d like to charter a sailboat from the Moorings. Oh, and I want to see Cape Reinga. Then Barry goes home and I’ll go down to Tauranga for a week until the Around Alone restart.

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Well, yesterday Oracle was eliminated by Alinghi in the Louis Vuitton Cup finals. Barry (my former officemate from Brightmail in San Francisco) has come out to NZ for a vacation. We met up a few days ago and yesterday he came out to my vantage point to watch the race with me. Today we’re renting a car are going around the North Island for a couple of weeks. We’re going to start in Waitomo where we’ll see some glowworms and go black water rafting.

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First, let me apologize for the long silence here on the weblog. It turns out that neither Sydney nor Katoomba had internet cafes that made keeping the weblog up-to-date easy. Anyway, I’m back in NZ now and I will be bringing the weblog up to the current date as quickly as possible. There’s a lot to write about, so it might take a few days.

So, the last time I wrote anything I had a few days to kill before leaving for Sydney. I ended up having a very quiet couple of days around Christmas. I did a lot of cooking (fresh bread, fresh biscuits, mac & cheese, buttermilk pancakes, and sweet potato chili). I shared a few meals with the hostel owner Stephen and his family. He also opened up his above-the-office apartment to some of us regulars and we all watched “Ben Hur” and “Cliff Hanger”. I also went swimming a couple of times. I think I prefer fresh water lakes to salt water gulfs, but water is better than no water. As a sailor, it felt very strange to deliberately put myself in the surf-zone, which normally I try to avoid like the plague.

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First, some news on the money front: at the rate I’ve been spending, I can comfortably afford to stay through the end of March, as planned. I’ve been keeping very close track of my finances. This is how they break down for the first month:

 Food         $457
 Transport    $577
 Phone        $275
 Mail         $45
 Internet     $57
 Laundry      $26
 Medical      $143
 Activities   $63
 Bed         ($100)

All figures are in Kiwi dollars, so divide by two to get US dollars. Transportation includes the bus, ferry and plane fare for my trip to Christchurch, as well as local bus service in and around Auckland. While I’m glad I did the Christchurch trip the way I did, the cost can easily be brought down dramatically by booking a flight well in advance. That would reduce the cost from $340 to about $150. Also, the Phone costs include the purchase of a new pre-pay mobile phone which I will be able to sell at the end of my trip and recoup about $100. Finally, the medical costs represent three doctor’s visits and antibiotics, all for treatment of an ingrown toenail. I include them to show the low cost of healthcare in NZ. I saved $100 by staying with the Fords in Wellington and the Tuffleys in Christchurch.

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