A 10 day Voyage on Spirit of New Zealand.

In February I spent 10 days aboard the Sail Training Ship, Spirit of New Zealand as a trainee. We sailed from Wellington, through the Sounds and French Pass, across Tasman Bay and back.

Spirit of New Zealand

It was the most amazing experience I’ve ever had!

It was completely different from any sailing I’ve done before. How many dinghy sailors know what a ‘Top Gallant Brace’ is? The Spirit weighs 240 ton, carries 14 sails, had 51 people aboard and is 148 foot long! Out of the 38 trainees there were only 3 of us with prior sailing experience.

Winning Whaler crew

The Strait crossing was very rough, 3-4 metre swells and 25+knot winds. Most of us were seasick, including some crew! After about 2 hours I just about decided to give up sailing!  The waves were huge coming into Tory Channel the wind was against the tide and they leap up into a mountainous valley like I’ve only seen on TV of Southern ocean racing yachts!

Each morning at 0600 hours we were woken by the night watch, if that failed a few minutes later the engineer turned the generator on and the whole boat shuddered slightly. No one was too eager to wake up as the swim awaited us!

Girls came too!

The morning cleanups weren’t anything to be excited about either. But we all got used to swabbing the decks and cleaning the heads! I like my sleep so night watch was not a favourite duty, but others found it fun. Being woken up in the middle of the night to go out in the cold on deck for 2 hours isn’t the best.

The crew were lots of fun, but I’m sure they’ve been on the boat too long! They started all the water fights and somehow enjoyed the morning swims! Although they taught us everything from basic navigation to sailing the Spirit, we even did silent tacks and gybes, it was really awesome teamwork just using hand signals!

Navigator  ... guessor? David McGahan

We frequently saw dolphins, but a large pod followed us through French Pass, one of the girls blew half a roll of film on them! In Torrent Bay we had match races in the Whalers, (at least these boats were familiar!) Starboard B my watch won our race with a nice lead!

Dolphins under the bow..

We also had a 4 hour tramp in Able Tasman, its really beautiful scenery around that area. I’ve never been a fan of heights so climbing the 75 foot high swaying foremast at midnight during a night sail across Tasman Bay was a really awesome challenge I conquered.

Furl the Top Galants!

By the last day climbing to the Royal (the highest yard arm) was no problem.

On trainee day we completely took over the running of the ship, I was elected one of the Navigators, we got to play with all the electronics, GPS, radars and charts. We plotted a course out of the Sounds and back to Wellington.

Starboard B Watch ...

The crossing was a brilliant sunny day with 2 metre rolling swells, I jumped out on the bowsprit, the Spirit looked really magnificent with all her sails up. We did a few short tacks across the harbour before anchoring off the motorway.

By the final day, none of us wanted to leave, I made some really good friends and we had such an awesome time together.