Monday 10 January Not so cold after all

In front of Mansion House

By chance our friends John and Lynn on Windflower who organised the All Points Rally from the Islands and the Cruisers Welcome Week in Opua which we enjoyed to the full when we first arrived, were also anchored in Mansion House Bay. We joined them for the early morning special at the café – coffee and a belly busting dinner plate size scone with jam and cream for NZ$5 (£2.50) – and made arrangements to go scallop hunting with them.


Windflower led the way, a couple of miles around the south of the island to Copper Mine Bay where we dropped the anchor in sand at 10m. For David and I this was going to be our first try for scallops and first dive in the chill(ier) water. We prepped with our thickest wetsuits, under vests, wetsuit hoods and gloves and goodie bags ready for the harvest. What wimps! The water was 21c, certainly not sub arctic, the visibility was OK but definitely good enough to see more scallops then we'd ever dreamed of! This was it – far, far easier than we'd imagined. They were easy to spot, put up no fight and plentiful. In less than 15 minutes we'd got our 20 per person / no smaller than 100mm across limit and back to the swim ladder. John showed us how to shuck our harvest which took longer than the collecting.

Cheeky weka at the cafe

Back in Mansion house Bay once more we took our booty over to Windflower for the last lesson in the collect-clean-cook-eat masterclass. Cook gently in generous quantities of garlic, butter and white wine, savour the deliciously sweet meat with a glass of chilled wine for a feeling of self satisfied smugness.

To quote Arnie, 'we'll be back'. For more.

Tuesday 11 January Healthy culture gathering

There are lots of good walks on Kawau island. We choose a moderate circuit to explore the old copper mine workings on the coast and return through red wood track. The first thing that struck us about the disused copper mine was that it looked like tin mine in Cornwall. Then we read it was built by Cornish tin miners in the 19th century.

Copper mine ruins

It was an easy walk back to Mansion House through the woods and past the one large red wood which gives the track it's name. Cunningly the path went so close to the café we just had to call in for coffee and cakes....as a reward for all the exercise today and yesterday.

We finished our afternoon with a visit to the house and a fine house it is too. Well worth a visit if you're passing.

And we still had scallops left from yesterday to have for tea.

the old boiler