We received an interesting opportunity from our British neighbor here in Whangarei.  He has a new Quad-Copter (i.e. “drone”) with a camera.  I asked him if he could take a picture of the area that included Charisma.  Well, here are the results.

Charisma with the blue deck, sandwiched between a 50- something foot Amel (above) and a 40- sometime foot Jeaneau on the lower part of the picture.

Besides the cool perspective, what’s interesting is how small we are relative to many cruisers these days.  Twenty years ago, Charisma (a Tayana 37 – a 37 foot boat) was a good size cruising boat.  Today, we’re one of the smaller boats out here.  Most of our contemporaries are sailing 40 to 50 foot boats these days.  It’s nice to have all the extra room, but the complexity and cost of sailboats goes up exponentially with size, so we’re happy with our 37 footer even if it means that on a voyage of a thousand miles we get in a day or so later than our friends.

Another advantage of the Quad-Copter is the stunning view of our area.

A look upriver to the town basin and center of Whangarei.

And, downriver toward the new (from last year) drawbridge.

And, while we’re at it here, we’ll report that Bob completed another chainplate rebedding (two out of three), and Ann finished polishing all the stainless and waxing the final bits of the cabin and deck.  We’re getting down to one more chainplate and the port side handrail as the last ugly jobs – then just some miscellaneous stuff and we’ll be ready to head out to Barrier Island for a few days on a shakedown cruise.  We need to find out what’s not working and importantly get the water maker cranked up since it was last “pickled” before we went home in December.  You’ll see from last year’s archives about this time that Barrier Island is also fun!  Fishing for snapper, oysters off the rocks, etc.  Yup, we’re looking forward to it.