Back to Lyttelton (7-10 March)

Its getting light a lot later in the mornings, and it was 7am before it was light enough for me to shift Honey onto Dad's mooring. It was high tide, the mooring clearly hadn't been used for some time and it was covered in muscles and sea growth – it was rather heavy work and took me longer than planned to get Honey safely on the mooring and all the sea growth removed, so I was still rowing back to the shore when Jill arrived to pick me up. A quick change – I was mucky – and then in to Blenheim, with wind turbine, autohelm and gas bottle to refill. Mum met me and Jill and I was left with Mum's car while she went back to work for the day. It was quite a nice day spent in Blenheim, mostly nosing around the bookshops, (a real change from being by myself on a boat) before we headed down to Christchurch and Lyttelton. As we approached Christchurch, Banks Peninsula was shrouded in cloud – I had imagined that the next time I would see Banks Peninsula would be approaching by sea from the north, so I was quite pleased that it was hidden. I kept a low profile while back in Lyttelton – Dad arranged for the wind turbine to be fixed, Tim gave me a charged battery to replace my house battery, there was not much that could be done with the autohelm but we did find out that changing the orientation of the compass could solve the problem. The trip down also gave us an opportunity to share with family our exciting news – Tim and I are getting married! (We had been keeping this quiet since Tim visited me in Fiordland). Having visited various family members so we could let them know in person, I headed back up to the Sounds with Tim who had managed to take a couple of days off work. We stayed on Tim's yacht “Treasure” in Waikawa on Sunday evening, my first chance to see her since he bought her at the start of the summer.