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Circumnavigating NZ.


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The Circle is complete

Wed Oct 07 2020

At 1610 I crossed my outbound track, surging into Matiatia on a brisk Southwest wind. I rounded up in the lee of the headland, furling the genoa and dropped the main for the last time. After over a month at sea I felt like an albatross folding it wings as it returns to the land from its soaring across the boundless oceans.
I have sailed two and a half thousand miles around New Zealand, through triumphs and disasters, challenges great and small, through happiness and despair. Through every emotion really. The hardest part has been dealing with myself, with the little mind that wants to give up or complain or be lazy or just feel sorry for itself. Out there alone I have passed through my own cold stormy nights but always I seem to manage to come through those into the glowing sunrise of a new day and I feel the better for the experience, cleansed in some way by the wind and the salt spray.
On the dock, as I glide in on the wind, finally engineless simply because I have run out of fuel, are my dear friends and family. They come to help and share in what is for me a very moving moment. Their kindness and care touches me deeply.
All these posts have been painstakingly tapped out, letter by letter with one finger, on the tiny keyboard on my phone, sometimes in very trying situations. It has been, in some way, a conversation I have been having with you. I had no one else to talk to.
So thank you if you read them, and thank you if you helped out by supporting the restoration of the Kate. She’s a fine old ship.
I am home now.
The circle is complete.

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And now an article about the circumnavigation in BoatingNZ, with more info about the skipper...

"You may recognise Mike’s name as the regular mate aboard Henk Haazen’s remarkable ice-capable steel yacht Tiama. Together they’ve taken many scientific expeditions – DOC ecologists, NIWA and MFAT researchers – to New Zealand’s sub-Antarctic Islands, to the Balleny Islands, the Ross Sea, and Antarctica itself."

https://boatingnz.co.nz/solo-circumnavigation/

 

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