The end of a long weekend

Now It wouldn't be a long weekend if someone didn't wait until sunset to need a tow home, would it? But we did manage to have a great weekend on the water.

This evening's call was to a 14m yacht, anchored at Moturekareka, with no working electrics. No battery power, so engine starting and no anchor winch!

We parked alongside, set up our tow lines and barged the yacht a little further offshore, while the owner retrieved the anchor from around 12m of water. That's actually quite a lot of hauling up an anchor using back power.

Then off to Sandspit at a sedate 7 knots. The sun disappeared as we arrived at the river mouth, where we went back into a barge formation to push the yacht up into the pile moorings, on the Matakana River.

Neale, on helm, got to grips with the fact a yacht with a large keel doesn't behave very well when maneuvering into an outgoing tide!

Slotting it stern on between 2 piles, backwards into the current didn't go so well, so after quite a bit of pushing, the owner managed to pull it around with his mooring lines.....

After refueling we did go back to retrieve the hand held radio we'd loaned them, so could hand over the bow line as well.

Thanks to Neale, Dave and Len, plus Airberth Al for setting up gear for our return

Oh, have you signed up for Golf Day?