Nice Wind Shift…Not! Day 6 to Fiji

On May 22nd, 2015 Published By B.J.

NZ-to-Fiji-Sunset-5-22-15One of the routine parts of passage making is watching the weather. We watch it carefully. We get weather reports emailed to us daily, we download weather model data (in a file called a GRIB) and watch the predictions, we get on the radio to one another and talk aboutthe weather.

There are several models that are produced by various weather authorities. In truth I am a little fuzzy on who produces them all and why, but sometimes they agree, some times they disagree. If you read all this information and download these models and study them eventually a picture of the weather situation emerges. It generally has the precision, clarity and beauty of Beethovens Ninth being played by a bunch of pre-schoolers with kazoos.

Last night we were discussing weather with another boat. The captain told me his model showed the wind dying off and expected to motor the last day or two to Fiji. Hmmthe GRIB file Id downloaded showed the wind picking up and staying on our beam, then turning slightly North towards the end of the trip but by then wed be sailing more West. That sounded a lot more pleasant. Motoring for two daysreaching along in a balmy 12-15 knots you decide.

So what do we REALLY have today? Well, the wind shifted North, and farther North than my GRIB predicted and earlier. And it built. His model was wrong, my model was wrong and we are sailing upwind into 18-20 knots beating towards Fiji. If you’ve been following this blog for a couple of passages (like the big bag of upwind stink that was Tahiti-NZ) you know how pleasant this can be.

Two models, two predictions, both completely wrong. On the plus side no unanticipated cyclones or tornados popped out of nowhere, so thats nice.

Keeping it Slow

The good news is, though it is slow especially if you want to be at all comfortable and be able to cook, eat, sleep and use the head without making a mess of yourself slow may be in order.

Our original plan was to leave NZ on a Monday or a Tuesday ensuring a mid week arrival in Fiji. Why? The overtime charges if you show up on a weekend are pretty high. Which is actually not a BAD thing, as some places just wont clear you in at all on the weekend. Our friends that are headed to New Caledonia should be getting there on Saturday, but Monday is a holiday there and they will be sitting on their boat until Tuesday morning. So the overtime is a good thing in that you can clear in, but a bad thing as it is quite expensive!

We left on a Sunday for a seven-ish day trip because of the weather window, not to time our arrival unfortunately. But with the slow sailing we’ve had on this trip our ETA is now sometime late Sunday afternoon to evening. One of our cardinal rules is that we NEVER, EVER come into a strange harbor in the dark. There is no sense in it sailing 1,000 miles safely to put the boat on the reef half a mile from your destination seems unwise. If our arrival shows it would be after 4:00 pm (sunset is around 5:30) wed stop and heave to anyway, just to be safe.

So we might as well slow it down and arrive when all the customs and immigration offices are open, and not have to drag anyone away from Sunday dinner to clear us in. So no rush.

P.S. – if the attached picture comes in, it was taken of last night’s spectacular sunset.

Posted in Fiji, passages | Comments Off on Nice Wind Shift…Not! Day 6 to Fiji

Why You Should Check Your Oil Every Day – Day 5 to Fiji

On May 21st, 2015 Published By B.J.

Every book on cruising, every engine user manual, every “tips and tricks for not killing your engine” guide, every coastal and cruising instructional course out there says one thing in common:

Check your engine oil every day.

This is basic, but I am convinced that only the most meticulous people that keep daily maintenance logs, work through a fifty point maintenance checklist every morning before breakfast, save every receipt for the boat ever, and write cruising and technical manuals for a living actually consider doing this.

While I will check it a few times during a trip, its not a daily thing, especially when the fool engine has been running for two days for lack of wind. Its a bit of a nuisance, as you can’t really check the engine oil when it is running. Certainly before leaving on a trip of this length I will check it, generally I will do a full oil change unless I’ve done only a few engine hours before leaving. If a passage is going well we won’t even run the engine for days, so climbing into the engine room every day to check a cold engine that was fine the day before seems a bit silly.

Well, we had a near miss this morning.

The wind picked up yesterday afternoon and we sailed into the evening and all night, so the engine was shut down. This was good, because I noticed that the 24V alternator on the engine was not charging, which 99.99% of the time is caused by some idiot (me) not properly tensioning the belt. Since we’d just put a new belt on I’d checked it, but in a total meathead maneuver didn’t check it again after 10-15 hours to see if it stretched. Fair enough, my punishment is I have to do it in a seaway instead.

So this morning as the wind started to die again we gave thought to starting up the engine. I grabbed my tools and climbed into the engine room to tighten the belt, when I noticed oil in the pan under the engine.

Keep in mind we’d just had the engine lifted out and had totally cleaned beneath it. You could have used the pan under the engine for a really big mixing bowl, if you didn’t mind a little grit in your bread – but there would NOT be oil in it! We’d also replaced the oil sump pan on the engine so I was immediately suspicious.

It was a fair amount of oil, not just a few drops but enough to slosh back and forth and make a huge mess. Yech. I couldn’t tell how much but it looked like a couple of quarts at least.

I searched around the engine for some oily parts, fortunately the mess I found was on the parts of the engine I could see, near the oil filter where a lot of connections come back into the oil sump. Splashes above the line of the sump/block connection indicated a leak there was unlikely, but I contacted the company in NZ that did the work anyway, Seapower. They got back to me quickly with some ideas to look into.

The next step was to clean up all the mess, add more oil, then run the engine and look for new messes. Easy enough.I put almost 2 quarts of oil into fill it on the dipstick. That isn’t as bad as it sounds, a full oil change for this 145HP turbocharged beast is about 11 quarts so this wasn’t enough loss to cause damage or trip the oil pressure alarms.

Hanging over the engine upside down with a flashlight I had Kathy fire up the engine. And.nothing. Then.ITS A GUSHER! Oil came spurting out of the dip stick, of all places. Odd. I wiped it down, made sure the stick was carefully in place and checked again.still came gushing out. I did note this process managed to get oil in all the places I’d cleaned up to observe, as well as me, my hands, my pants, and a bunch of rags. After letting the engine rest a bit I checked, my fill level was fine.

After conversation via Sat phone with Seapower to confirm this (Thanks Wayne!), I checked the crankcase breather. This is a little plastic tube that runs between one of the valve rocker covers and the air filter. The idea is this is a pressure release for the crankcase, so any expanding air and gasses have somewhere to go to keep the oil pressure normalized. Taking a bit of clothes hanger wire, I removed the tube and cleaned it out, replacing it with some tie downs that I though restricted the tube a little less.

This seemed to sort it. I say seemed because idling the engine for five minutes isn’t really going to convince me it is completely fixed. Running at cruising speed for 24 hours, that might make me a believer.

But you will be darned sure I will be watching it like a hawk.

And checking the oil every day.

But the Real Crime in this.

The real crime, the true tale of human misery and drama here is that I was so focused on sorting out the engine that I didn’t get a fishing line out this morning. And wouldn’t you know it we sailed through a huge school of gigantic tuna. We could see them jumping and splashing clear of the water quite close to the boat. If I had a line in the water it would have gone right through the feeding school.

So I missed my opportunity for a nice tuna, though if I’d landed an 80 pound yellowfin I have no idea what I’d do with all of it since the freezer is pretty full. I’d be happier with something in the 10-20 pound range since I only have one little tube of wasabi paste on board.

But it didn’t exactly make my already kinda crappy morning to watch 50+ pound fish making six and eight foot splashes while I fumbled to get the line in the water.

Posted in broken things, Fiji, Fish, passages | Comments Off on Why You Should Check Your Oil Every Day – Day 5 to Fiji

Shorts Ho! Day 4 to Fiji

On May 20th, 2015 Published By B.J.

Woohoo its finally starting to feel tropical! This morning it is warm enough to wear just shorts and a t-shirt in the cockpit and no shoes. Finally!

Last night for about an hour we had some great wind – 18 to 20 knots on the beam – I sailed blissfully along from about 0100 until 0200 making good speed on a close reach. Then the wind dies back to what it still is now, about 6-8 knots from the SE direction. Enough to tease us that we might sail, but when we cut the engine and try to sail is a lot slower than we’d hope to move. We hope it will fill in over the next twenty four hours, or at least the forecast gives us hope it will.

Other than the warmth and lovely sunny weather there isn’t too much difference. We’re fishing now in hope of catching a Mahi-mahi or a tuna, and Danielle is baking cookies.

We’re starting to get into the rhythm of passage life.

Posted in Fiji, passages | Comments Off on Shorts Ho! Day 4 to Fiji

Day 3 to Fiji – Do a Wind Dance, Please.

On May 19th, 2015 Published By B.J.

Do you remember yesterday how I was complaining that the wind was “all from the wrong direction”, “dead down wind” and “slow”?

I take it all back.

Last night the wind started getting lighter and more shifty. All night we watched it closely, heading the boat up for speed when it got light, changing the course to accommodate the shifts, heading off the wind to get back to our course when the strength built up. Adjustments were made constantly to keep us moving forward. We had several close calls when we thought the wind was just gone and not coming back, but each time it recovered and we kept sailing.

Eventually around 4:00 a.m. the wind just gave up.

We’d been expecting this as a high pressure system was expected to pass through, but it was our hope it might take a little longer to get here and give us at least until daylight to make our sail changes and start motoring. No such luck.

The good news is that without wind you don’t have so many waves, so if you have to motor at least it isn’t through huge swells and steep chop. Just some annoying rolling which isn’t too bad as you get used to it.

A Day in the Life

As I post these I realize that I am frequently doing so at odd hours on places like the East Coast of the U.S. where most of my friends and family live in the Eastern Time Zone. We’re on the other side of the date line from the U.S. which makes it tomorrow – as I type this it is 11:30 AM on Wednesday, May 20th but in the states it is still Tuesday at 7:30 in the evening – a day behind, but in time of day EST is eight hours ahead of us. So to make it a little more clear what is happening when you are sitting down to dinner, sleeping or at work and why I sometimes send e-mails and blog post at 3:00 in the morning, here is a brief overview of our schedule, which ship’s local time in 24 hour notation, and the time on the East Coast of the U.S.

  • 0600 (2:00 pm EST) – Danielle takes over the morning watch until people start getting up
  • 0900 (5:00 pm EST) – Most everyone is up and away, having breakfast
  • 1000-1400 (6-10:00 pm EST) – good time for radio propagation and sending e-mails. I will usually write blog posts and send e-mails around this time.
  • 1400-1700 (10pm – 1am EST) – during the afternoon we share off watching in the cockpit, making lunch, sleeping, listening to audiobooks, etc.
  • 1700 (1:00 am EST) – Typically when we have dinner, we try to do this before it gets dark as it is easier to prep and clean up.
  • 1900 (3:00 am EST) – We get on a radio call with a few buddy boats that are traveling the same direction to check in and report positions.
  • 1930-2000 (2:30 – 4:00 AM EST) – I may send a few more e-mails and try to download a weather update. At this point I generally lie down to get some sleep before my watch. Danielle will frequently head to bed around this time.
  • 2100 – Midnight (5 – 8:00 am EST) – First watch, this is Will’s shift. Kathy goes to bed at 9:00 local and Will stays on watch by himself until I get up at midnight.
  • Midnight – 0300 (8 – 11:00am EST) – Second watch, this is my (B.J.) watch.
  • 0300 – 0600 (11 am – 2:00 pm EST) – Third watch, Kathy’s shift. She wakes Danielle up at 6:00 am and the cycle repeats.

As it gets warmer and the waves flatten out I will likely break the routine up a little more by fishing during daylight hours, but it is a fairly structured day.

When you are on watch at night you are the only one up, and you are not only looking out for other boats (pretty rare) but you are watching the wind, waves, and conditions and making changes needed to the boat trim. We try to minimize these changes and sail conservatively at night, as the last thing you want at night is someone going overboard doing unnecessary maneuvers. So we sail safe and conservatively when the sun is down, not taking a lot of risks. But the watch stander has to have the judgment to know the conditions and how to deal with them, and when it is time to wake someone up to help. This is important, as we have a rule that NO ONE, under ANY CIRCUMSTANCES leaves the cockpit unless someone else is in the cockpit with them watching. So a minor sail change that requires something like easing a preventer line you want to have company on deck for.

As it sounds we have some fairly strict safety rules we follow on passages and off shore. A list of our off shore safety commandments might be a good topic for another post.

Posted in Fiji, passages | Comments Off on Day 3 to Fiji – Do a Wind Dance, Please.

Request to Help With Sharing!

On May 19th, 2015 Published By B.J.

Once again, I’d like to ask my our readers if they could take a moment to share the blog posts up on Facebook, particularly if someone could share it on the Sail Evenstar Facebook Page.

While I can regale you with tales of high adventure about sailing downwind slowly, breaking things and tossing dead fish off the deck I can not browse the web to post the usual links to Facebook for those that like to follow things out there, or rely on the Facebook page for notifications of new posts.

Thanks.

P.S. – Today’s AM Fish Body count:

Flying Fish: 3
Squid: 1

Consult your bookie for odds on tomorrow’s count.

It still disturbs me to no end that squid are able to leap high enough out of the water to land on deck, even high enough to land on top of the dodger. I do not want to get hit by one of those at night.

Posted in Fiji, Housekeeping, passages | Comments Off on Request to Help With Sharing!

//WL2K Slow Boat to Fiji – Day 2

On May 18th, 2015 Published By B.J.

Well we’re not getting there fast, that’s for sure.

And its still pretty cold. Getting warmer, but not so as you’d want to be running around in shorts just yet. Or even just one layer of clothes.

We’re still sailing downwind and putting up less than stellar performance numbers; the noon-to-noon distance for the last twenty four hours was a paltry 164 miles, and THAT wasn’t all “VMG” or ””Velocity Made Good” which is navigation-speak for “of the miles I travelled, how many of them actually got me closer to where I was going”.

This bit refers to vector math, which is handy if you want to figure out exactly how fast you aren’t sailing. If we were able to sail directly at Fiji while making eight knots then our “Velocity Made Good” for one hour would be eight nautical miles. We traveled eight miles through the water, and it got us eight miles closer to Fiji. Very straightforward. But if we are sailing a course that is 30 West of directly at Fiji then sailing eight miles does not actually move us eight miles closer to Fiji, it moves us some amount West and some amount towards Fiji. So you subtract the West vector from our total course vector and the remaining vector is our “Made Good” vector towards Tahiti.

In this example I made it easy, as it is a simple 30/60/90 right triangle with a hypotenuse of eight, the West vector is the short side and our VMG is the longer vector. Or in this case VMG = 1/2 * (8) * Square Root (3) = 6.93 miles. Simple, right? Every eight miles we sail at 30 degrees off our target moves us only 6.93 miles closer to our destination. (please feel to correct my math in the comments if I muffed this!)

Which means our measly 164 miles of sailing in the last twenty-four hours actually only accomplished about 142 miles of getting closer to Fiji if you assume we are about 30 degrees off the course we want to sail, which isn’t too far off really. By comparison, on our trip to the Marquesas we had several days when we made more than 200 miles, and averaged about 186 miles per day all pretty much in the direction we intended to go

So why is this so slow? We actually actually have reasonably strong winds, we’ve seen winds in the teens and twenties. Its because we are trying to head Dead Down Wind. If the wind were ninety degrees to the boat we’d be flying straight at Tahiti making 8-10 knots with three sails drawing, blasting over and through the waves.

Going Dead Down Wind (or DDW) though means the physics don’t quite work so well for you. The wind behind the boat makes the main sail blanket the forward sails; we can’t even fly the staysail in these conditions it will just flop and droop. Even the genoa doesn’t stay full well. With the boat boat much less “powered up” we are more at the mercy of the waves, which can roll the boat and backwind the sails which makes them flutter and flap rather that push the boat forward. So progress is a series of smooth accelerations and building speed.right until we roll off a wave the wrong way, backwind the sails and lose several knots of speed. Lather, rinse, repeat.

So we can be slow both physically AND mathematically!

There are ways to combat this, and if the DDW conditions persist tomorrow we may have to break out “the poles”. These are the dreaded spinnaker poles which are permanently mounted on the side of the boat. I say “dreaded” because they are very large, very heavy, and until recently demonstrated a strong proclivity to fall of their fittings on the mast when one tried to use them. Having a twenty foot long 100lb+ pole decide to drop on your head in a seaway is NOT a fun experience, in fact it could be fatal. So we’ve avoided using the poles over the years from a quite literal fear of death and/or maiming.

We thought we’d fixed the problem when we left in 2012, we spent a fair amount of money replacing the end fittings on the poles both on the poles themselves and the fitting on the mast where it looked worn. This really didn’t help, the the vibration caused by thousands of miles of sailing wore the fittings again. However, in New Zealand we took a more unorthodox tactic, and had the rigger drill through the detachable fittings and put a bolt through there. This should keep the poles form trying to kill us, but we are still quite understandably nervous.

The use of the poles involves setting the main on one side of the boat and running the head sail sheet through the jaws in the end of the pole on the other side of the boat. The pole is positioned to hold the sail out opposite the main in a “wing and wing” configuration, and should keep the head sail from constantly collapsing, rubbing, chafing and shaking the boat. The full sail should help the boat sail much more quickly, and more importantly closer to dead down wind which increases that all important VMG.

Of course Wing & Wing is not without risks, you sail closer to the wind and thesk of gybing is higher. I’ve sailed Wing & Wing many times, though I usually do it with hand steering in flatter conditions so the boats roll is less of a factor.

Given our pathological fear of our own spinnaker poles, this is not a technique we’ve used a lot with this boat. But if this DDW stuff persists we may be working out some new techniques.

Posted in Down Wind, Fiji, passages | Comments Off on //WL2K Slow Boat to Fiji – Day 2

Its Not Warm Yet – Day one to Fiji

On May 17th, 2015 Published By B.J.
BJ told me there was an Albatross circling his boat and asked me to find a picture, so here it is. -- Andrew

BJ told me there was an Albatross circling his boat and asked me to find a picture, so here it is. — Andrew

We’re almost a full day en route to Fiji and I can say unequivocally that it has not actually started to get warm yet.

Our current latitude is analogous to somewhere in South Carolina, though we don’t have a great big land mass nearby. The is from the South, which of course you must remember here in the Land of Opposites that the South is the Place the Cold Comes from.

So we’re not wearing shorts, we’re not playing Jimmy Buffet and we’re not fishing yet. Too darn cold.

The sailing is.OK. Dead Down Wind – when the wind is blowing on a line straight from New Zealand to Fiji is what we’re dealing with here. Just like going upwind, you can’t sail in a straight line where you want to go though for different reasons. Going down wind you want to avoid an accidently “gybe”, where the wind crosses the back of the boat and slams all the sails hard from one side to another. This is a bad thing to do accidentally and is how boats and people can get hurt out here.

So we sail a bit up from “Dead” downwind, and zigzag across the wind never quite pointing where we want to go. We also go faster this way as straight down wind is really slow, and doing a broad reach is much quicker. So our direction made towards Fiji is still higher even if we are sailing an oblique course.

Our current arrival time is hard to pick. We originally hoped to avoid coming in on the weekend or after hours as the overtime charges at customs clearing in can be quite high. But last week’s weather did not cooperate, instead of a nice window to leave mid-week (which was, coincidentally before our New Zealand visas expired). But the weather pattern was ugly, two “Troughs” or low pressure waves came through during the week dumping lots of rain, wind and waves on us in Opua. Those troughs were followed by an actual low pressure storm system which we really wanted to avoid.

All of the above conspired to keep us in NZ looking for a safe departure window until Sunday, some thirty six hours after the point where we were no longer legally in the country. We talked it over with customs and immigration and they are very understanding, we had no fear that the immigration police would storm the docks and cut our lines forcing us to leave. Unlike some countries, NZ has the sense to know that sort of behavior just leads to more business for the Coast Guard down the road. It just means more paperwork when we return.

But to date this has been uneventful, and uneventful is what we strive for on passages. Your best passage is deathly dull in that regards, with nothing but easy weather, constant winds, not too much by way of waves to deal with and nothing breaking. See our trip to NZ from Tahiti for an example of how you don’t want to do it!

So here is to a continuing dull trip, with hopefully several more dreadfully dull blog updates with nothing to tell you about but seeing cool marine life and catching fish!

Posted in Fiji, New Zealand, passages | Comments Off on Its Not Warm Yet – Day one to Fiji

All our Bags are Packed, Ready to Go

On May 16th, 2015 Published By B.J.

No, we’re not Leaving on a Jet Plane, but we are leaving New Zealand today.

We’ve been here six months, its getting cold, and we’re ready to head to warmer places for a while, so its off to Fiji.

It is about a six-day trip, plus or minus a day.  It is a little over 1,000 miles from Northern New Zealand to Fiji.

We’d hoped to leave a little earlier but the weather has been a bit dodgy so we’ve had to wait.  So we’ve spent the last week saying our goodbyes, tucking the car away, making last-minute fixes on the boat and getting supplies and provisions.

I all of you a big pile of posts from New Zealand, I know.  More on the fun stuff we did, and more about all the boat work.  We didn’t actually explore much of the country by boat but we put many thousands of kilometers on the car while we were here and had some fantastic visits from family.  It really has been a nice time and the boat is in much better shape now than when we got here.

A brief list of what we did here includes:

  • Painting the bottom
  • Replacing the horrible Westerbeast generator with a shiny new one from Northern Lights.
  • Pulling the main engine out, cleaning it up, fixing things like a rusted oil pan and making pre-emptive repairs.
  • Replacing all the standing rigging but the backstay – the wires that hold up the mast.
  • Replacing some of the lines and running rigging including the checkstays and a new outhaul.
  • Repairing all the sails; re-doing some work we had done in French Polynesia, repairing ongoing wear and tear.
  • Professionally overhauling the dinghy to finally fix all the damage caused by the dinghy dock from hell in Panama.
  • Replacing all eight 12V batteries with 16 new 6V batteries with about 10% more capacity
  • Replacing the freezer compressor with a more powerful one and fixing a leak in the line
  • Replacing the old 12V battery charger
  • and the old broken backup 24V battery charger.
  • Upgrading to a new version of MaxSea, our navigation software
  • Repairing the ship’s PC
  • Conditioning the propeller with Propspeed to reduce fouling and growth
  • Re-inspected and certified the Life Raft and updated much of the SOLAS safety gear.
  • Rebuilt the clutch on the backup autopilot and re-installed it.

There was still more to do, but we already made a much larger contribution to the local economy than we had planned so we just had to scream “no more” and leave some things undone.  I promise some more gruesome detail and pictures in some other posts, but time is pressing now.

But the things that vexed us on the way here from Tahiti – except the wind and current of course – should not be a problem for a while!

We’re going to miss New Zealand, but new adventures await.  We are planning to return here at the end of the cruising season – which is a first for us since setting out in 2012.  When we come back though we will only be three, because some time in September we pack Will off for Southhampton Solent University in the UK where he will spend the next three years training to be a yacht designer.  Not only will we miss HIM because he is our kid and we like his company, but we will have to learn how to sail with a crew of three because we lose a very valuable crew member.

But that is for the future and I don’t want to think about it.

On to Fiji!  I’ll do my best to post here daily en route and let you know with it finally gets warm enough to put our shorts back on.

Posted in Fiji, New Zealand, passages, projects | 2 Comments

Nerdvana Part II – the Rest of Middle Earth

On Feb 7th, 2015 Published By B.J.

Continuing on with our LOTR tours in New Zealand…if you haven’t seen Part I which is pretty much all about Hobbiton you should start there.

Weathertop (Amon Sûl)

Unfortunately the hills used for the attack on Weathertop are deep in private property – it is not really possible to get to it to have a close up look at the actual hill. However, there is no ruined tower there anyway! The site used is apparently a composite of a real hills from this general area with CGI effects to add the tower.

IMG_0797

This is kind of like where Weathertop was shot.  Might even have been the spot…lots of CGI there.

The region where some of this was filmed is near Port Waikato on the West coast of the North Island. It is actually the last site we visited, but I figure it is more interesting to present them to you in the order they show up in the story rather than follow our willy-nilly path all over the countryside.

Port Waikato is somewhat remote but absolutely beautiful. Located at the mouth of the Waikato river where it meets the Tasman Sea, there is a small summer village and some nice beaches. It is a popular summer spot but you need to bring your own supplies because there isn’t much there besides the summer cottages and camp grounds.  We showed up hoping to stay in a campground and dine locally; good luck with that one!

Zoomed out you can see the huge valley, there is a cliff behind the kids that is farther from the road than usual.

Zoomed out you can see the huge valley, there is a cliff behind the kids that is farther from the road than usual.

To reach the hills where the movie was set you need to head through Port Waikato onto a small, very winding road. I mean winding by New Zealand standards, where Route 1 – the Kiwi  equivalent of I-95 in the U.S.  – has twists and turns in it where you can’t do more than about 30 mph around them. Very quickly after you leave the coast the land gets steep and the character changes, with steep-sided pastures full of cows, sheep and rocky bluffs. Eventually the road changes to gravel and becomes a single lane, with the inevitable plunge over the side to a certain and fiery death. Which I am becoming quite used to by the way, as well as driving on the wrong side of the road.  Of course by then the gravel road is a single lane so there is no “side” to worry about, except the one you can drive off, of course.

Some of these places the film crews had to get to by helicopter, or they had to build roads to them.  Apparently there was a fair it of staying at some landmark hotels and choppering in to film.

The River Anduin

The River Anduin, heavily featured in The Fellowship of the Ring, was actually a composite of several rivers in both the North and South islands of New Zealand.  Unfortunately I was a little confused when we set out and thought we were heading to the Argonauth and was looking forward to convincing Will to take the part of Isuldur when we re-created the image on camera using clever forced perspective.

Will would have been the one on the left.

As it turns out the gorge where the Argonath was added in is way down in South Island somewhere.  So we had to be content with some of the other scenic parts of the river.

There are some scenes showing the Fellowship paddling through gorges and along a beautiful scenic river – it was to one of these that we headed.

New Zealanders are a little touched about some things, in particular adrenalin.  There some things that to Kiwis are considered “fun”, whereas someone like myself might consider them “wretched”, “terrifying” or “vomit inducing”.  These include acts like bungee jumping from cliffs, bridges and buildings, an appalling looking thing called a “Flying Fox” and even some thing in Auckland where they launch you up from the perfectly solid ground high into the air for no apparent reason.

It was to one of these places that we set out for – Gravity Canyon, where one can take an 80 meter (250 foot) bungee jump into a canyon over the Rangitikei river or ride the appalling Flying Fox.

This may be one of the Rangitikei shots, but the water was much lower for us.

The Rangitikei river is one of the rivers used in the gorge scenes on the Anduin.  The scenes on the river are fairly fast and hard to make out.  More importantly for me…if you haven’t picket up on it yet I’m not a huge fan of heights.  I’ll deal with them if I have to, for example climbing on the roof of the house was doable, if hated.  But that sort of cliff front “hey let’s go spit over the edge” thing just isn’t something I love.

Which also suggests that DRIVING along these huge gorges on narrow winding country roads without freaking guard rails is not my idea of fun either.  By the time we got back to the Gravity Gorge I was pretty much ready to start drinking heavily. The health nuts that run that place though seemed to feature only milk shakes and smoothies for some reason, I suppose Liquid Courage is discouraged if you are about to fling yourself off a bridge into a 250 foot deep gorge lest you send your stomach contents further down onto the recovery crew at terminal velocity.  It’s what I would do.

We did take some pictures, but they weren’t too spectacular as there hadn’t been any rain for weeks and the river looked more like a trickle than a torrent.  You got a feel for the gorges, but the water was very hard to pick out.  And I had an incident with my camera card, so the pictures I took by sidling up to the edge and shooting over the side with my eyes closed were lost anyway; I may come back and edit later if I find a good one on the kids cameras.

The Emyn Muil

Andy Serkis really earned my respect when we visited the site of some of the Emyn Muil footage. As Gollum you didn’t really see Andy Serkis on-screen until The Return of the King, where I am fairly certain they gave him screen time because he couldn’t qualify for any nominations as a supporting actor with only a CGI avatar on the screen. But he may have had the toughest job of any actor on the set. In spite of being scrawny and wasted Gollum is a pretty physical character – he gets in fights, climbs, jumps, splashes in streams, bites people, and in general gets smacked around a lot. To create this they covered Mr. Serkis in a suit with body motion sensors while he acted out all Gollum’s body motions which were later re-skinned and scaled to look like this gangrel, ill favoured creature.

That’s Mr. Serkis on the right…

 

Apparently this included climbing down a cliff face upside down.

 

IMG_8463Here is the spot they above scene was filmed. Believe it or not, it is actually at a ski resort. Which is on a volcano, Mt. Ruapehu which last erupted in 2007, when some of the ejecta worked its way to the resort.

No matter how hard core Volcano Skiing may seem, I am more impressed that Andy Serkis climbed down that inverted cliff face wearing Virtual Reality imaging gear to get the shot. Even though I’m sure they had a harness on him, climbing down that to do a movie take is pretty badass.

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Same cliff, looking straight up. Nope. Uh-uh, I wouldn’t do it.

The whole area around the ski resort is like the Emyn Muil; razor sharp rocks, little vegetation, steep cliffs and huge boulders. Even spring skiing in New England doesn’t prepare you for this.

What is also amazing is the transformation, this is only a couple of hundred kilometers or so from the verdant rolling hills of Hobbiton, and the lush flowered pools of Ithilien you pass on the road up to the ski resort.

Of course the presence of a few volcanoes in the region may be related to this. This part of New Zealand is particularly active in that regard with most of the prominent land features including the largest lake in the country being formed by volcanic activity.

Ad an interesting aside to this tour, we essentially followed the Waikato River from it’s origins draining Lake Taupo to its delta at Port Waikato, crossing and recrossing it and watching it grow and change as we moved from the start to the finish.

Ithilien

Hobbiton was the only packaged up tour site we tracked down. There are literally dozens of spots all over the country where you can see sites that are the exact locations used, or spots that are used as the basis for scenes in the films. In one of those almost spots you can visit a water fall that formed the basis for the Hidden Pool in Ithilien where Gollum is captured by Faramir and the men of Gondor.

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Similar falls to the set of the Forbidden Pool

New Zealand is loaded with these sorts of spots – beautiful rock strewn waterfalls and rivers. This particular one is reached from a short walk off the road that heads up to the ski areas around the volcanoes that were use in shots of Mordor, the Emyn Muil and Mount Doom.

Of course with scenes like this one being set at night you can’t really appreciate the full beauty of the locations.

This particular scene, where Sam, Frodo and Gollum are walking in a stream somewhere around Ithilien is a spot you can visit.  This is right off the road going to a second ski area.  With the exception of the water flow, which was very low from the lack of rain, the stream and spot where Gollum chases a fish is pretty much the same.  I will come back and re-edit this to add our photo in, as my pictures were lost.

Mordor

Mordor.  The blackest name in Middle Earth, one that people will not use at night or in the dark…or at all.

Its actually quite a nice area of New Zealand.

As you can see from the picture from my NZ Road Guide, these are real places.

As you can see from the picture from this shot of my handy NZ Road Guide, these are real places.

Both Mordor and Mount Doom are in the Tongariro National Park.   And neither of them are particularly accessible by car.  As it was we bottomed out our Odyssey (with its seeming 3″ ground clearance) more than once just trying to get to some of these places.

The whole area is beautiful.  It is very stark with all the volcanic rock and there isn’t a lot of plant or animal life around.

The National Park is a favorite of hikers and back packers, and it is really the only way to get a good closeup view of some of the volcanoes.

Just a bit to the left, past the bunny slopes.

Just a bit to the left, past the bunny slopes.

Dagorlad

The plains where the battle of the Last Alliance of Elves and Men fought Sauron was also filmed at the same ski resort where Gollum attacked the hobbits in the Emyn Muil.   This scene occurs at the very beginning of The Fellowship of the Ring, where Isuldur cuts the ring from the hand of Sauron.

Apparently the closeups and cut scenes were filmed on these rough gravelly slopes and then thousands of CGI Elves and Orcs were added to complete the battle.

OK, for the purists and nitpickers this isn’t actually IN Mordor, but its right in front of it.  Its close enough.

Mount Doom

The flaming, erupting iconic Mount Doom in the movies is based on real life volcano Mount Ngauruhoe.  I can see why Tolkien changed the name to Mount Doom, he probably couldn’t pronounce it either.  It too is a steep sided cone and is a bit difficult to get to.  We didn’t actually get all that close to it, as the only way to do so would be to take a rather long hike known as the Tongariro Alpine Crossing which is about a nineteen kilometer (12 mile) one way hike through fairly rough territory.  None of the driving roads into the park come all that close to it, at least no roads we could get to in our minivan.

The Tongariro Alpine Crossing is a challenging hike over active volcanoes, rugged and sometimes steep rocky terrain; you need a reasonable level of fitness.

Eruption hazard remains in the Active Volcanic Hazard Zone on the northern side of Mount Tongariro. Observe the warning signs in place. Know the volcanic risks and what to do in an eruption.

We really weren’t dressed for it and we didn’t have a ride at the other end.  Though to not quite plead total wimpiness, we have done similar volcano hikes before though there wasn’t any snow there.  Nor were there guides.  Or sandwiches.

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Mount Doom, without the great runnels of flaming lava.

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You can’t have just one picture of Mount Doom.

The real life Mount Doom has snow on it much of the year, but it is still considered quite active.  As are all the volcanoes in the area, the most recent eruption was less than eight years ago.  Hikers are cautioned to be aware of the risks and there is extensive seismic monitoring to guard against eruptions.  I say “guard against” in the sense of “be ready for” rather than “actually be able to do much about”.  From reading the material in the Tongariro Park visitors center it is clear the major Volcanic Mitigation Strategy is to Get Out of Dodge as fast as you can because there isn’t a whole lot you can do when mother nature acts up like this.

It would be very, very cool to get a more closeup look at Mount Doom but I fear that isn’t in the cards for us this time around.

Other Places / More Touring

There are many, many more movie locations to see in New Zealand.  Around Wellington at the South end of North Island are many sights, with the actual studios in Wellington that New Line used for filming on sound stages as well.  Of course nothing is really left in some of those places as the filming is long done.  For this trip to head to Wellington would have added another three or four hours of driving beyond the driving we’d already done.  With almost four hours to Auckland, then a few hours South to Hobbiton and a few more hours South to Mordor we really had done quite enough driving for a five day expedition.

South Island, which is considerably less populated and more wild than North Island, is the site many more spots for the Tolkien Tourist.  Maybe when we come back for South Island we can see some more then.

I would like to add that none of this would have been possible without the Lord of the Rings Location Guidebook by Ian Brodie.  We purchases the smaller pocket edition of the book which gave a very succinct overview of the sites and gave excellent directions and descriptions of what to look for.

I’d be doing anyone that is interested in this sort of touring a big disservice if I didn’t plug his books!

 

Posted in LOTR, New Zealand, Volcano | Comments Off on Nerdvana Part II – the Rest of Middle Earth

Nerdvana – LOTR Touring in Middle Earth Part 1

On Feb 6th, 2015 Published By B.J.
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This is NOT a still from the movie promo sites. I took it. Really.

We’ve admitted to being a pretty nerdly lot on Evenstar before, we’ve even named boats (including this one) out of Tolkien.  Star Trek, Doctor Who, Tolkien and fantasy and SciFi of all sorts are staples of family entertainment on Evenstar.   So coming to New Zealand where the Lord of the Rings movies were filmed, well you just can’t pass up those sights!

hobbiton

Peter Jackson filmed the Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit (which we care about a lot less for many geeky reasons which can mostly be summed up as “more is sometimes less…”) all over New Zealand.  All of the stunning vistas and gorgeous views of Middle Earth as well as some of the most bleak and blasted landscapes of Mordor are taken directly from New Zealand – or at least start with New Zealand as the canvas to which the movie mages apply their CGI.

To wit, a tourism industry has sprung up here to support all the fans of the books and movies interested in dressing as orcs, hobbits and elves and going sightseeing.  One can actually book a packaged three-week tour where you fly to New Zealand and tour the country and movie sites by bus, car, plane, foot, helicopter, raft and boat to see dozens of movie sites, studios, sets, and relics spread out over both North and South island.

We, of course, are way too cheap to do THAT.

But what we did do was take the family truckster for a few days while the boat is on the hard and take a spin South to see some of the sights and get our geek on for a bit.

By the way I’m going to assume here in this post that you have some familiarity with The Lord of the Rings (or LOTR hereafter), The Hobbit, and Tolkien’s work and some of the characters and places in them.  I’m not going to re-explain them here but I will try to find links and video clips to put what we are seeing in context.  Often the Extended Edition of the movies from the DVD’s shows a bit more.

Hobbiton

Both the Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit have opening sequences in the idyllic, pastoral Shire and the town of Hobbiton.  In both movies it sets the stage for the mild-mannered existence of the hobbits before they are dragged from their pipes and second breakfasts into the chaos of the rest of Middle Earth and in the LOTR provides the touchstone for the hobbits for why they are doing what they are doing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meK0G3o9mPw

Hobbiton is in the middle of a sheep farm in New Zealand, about two hours driving Southwest of Auckland.  Apparently the farmer had never heard of the LOTR when Mr. Jackson sat down in his kitchen to negotiate terms for using his land…but his wife had.  There are about 13,000 sheep that share the Hobbiton set, but now that farmer is retired and his sons share the roles of running the movie set and tending the sheep.

FIMG_8069or the LOTR the set used a lot of temporary structures; foam blocks and canvases and things that disappeared after the filming.   The movie aired in New Zealand and a lot of the locals recognized the mountain ranges that appear for a few seconds and realized the films were set nearby.  The first “set tour” may have been conceived in a pub and consisted of a few mates in a pickup coming to look at the essentially empty fields of Hobbiton.  Needless to say, word got out…

IMG_8092When the folks from New Line returned to talk to the owner of the farm about The Hobbit, the farmer very shrewdly got them to agree to make the sets permanent.  He recognized that there was definitely a tourism business developing (could it be all the costumed people scaring his sheep flocks?) and saw he could make a nice permanent attraction.  So the film crew agreed and the second time around Hobbiton was recreated with permanent facades an structures instead of foam blocks.

IMG_8125The owners of the property have done a wonderful job maintaining the location, with beautiful gardens and grounds.  In addition the set from the Green Dragon pub that is featured at the end of the Return of the King, and more extensively in the extended DVD release, was moved and reconstructed on site.  The hobbit holes are generally false fronts, though one of them you can step into and for Bag End the created the initial entrance foyer for a depth of about 30 feet.

For reasons which are pretty clear from the number of people that come to the Hobbiton Movie Set you can’t just walk around.  From the staging area off the “main” (and I use this term lightly) road you must take a bus through the 13,000 sheep to get to the little dale, hill and pond where the movies where filmed.  The tour takes about ninety minutes and ends at the Green Dragon for a complimentary beer, hard cider or ginger beer.  On the whole we could have spent more time there just breathing in the ambiance, it is a charming place.  But I suspect if they let people wander loose in no time you’d have folks trying to dig up Bag End for Bilbo’s gold or just wander off and lose themselves.

What is impressive is some of the effort you learn that the movie makers made for authenticity.  That is what makes someone like Peter Jackson a good director to recreate a fantasy world, he pays attention to detail that none of consciously notice but might jar something in the back of our heads.

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For example there is a tree growing on top of Bilbo’s hole at Bag End.IMG_8156 It can be seen from the distance and up close in these two pictures.  When filming the LOTR the crew found a tree they liked elsewhere, dug it up, and replanted it on top of the hill.  Of course in the long run the tree didn’t like this much and didn’t survive the transplant.

Fast forward a few years to filming The Hobbit, which is actually set some fifty years before the LOTR.  So what the special effects people had to do was re-create the exact tree that was on Bag End in the LOTR, except fifty years younger.  Which they did, with metal, fabric, fake leaves and other various prop substances – they built an entire fake tree to avoid the discontinuity of having a wrong shaped tree sitting on Bilbo’s house.  The leaves look a little too green in real life, but it worked for the movies.

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No Hobbits were harmed in the taking of this picture, though these holes never appeared in the movies.

Peter Jackson’s crew actually went so far as to build a whole patch of hobbit holes that never actually made it on screen.  The idea apparently was that if any distance shots were needed, or shots with other holes in the background they could have this little patch of holes available so as not to reuse the other holes inappropriately.  But they were never needed and never used.

Some of the other fascinating things that we learned involved how the movies were created, some of the tricks employed by the crews to deal with the scale issues of having six foot tall actors on screen next to nearly six-foot tall actors that were playing three foot tall hobbits. A lot of CGI was obviously used in these movies, but there were a lot of age old techniques like “forced perspective” and other camera tricks that achieved the same effect.

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This hole is only four feet tall, we are actually hobbits. Though I hate shaving my feet to look normal.

The hobbit holes in Hobbiton are made in all different sizes, in order that actors of different sizes could be shot next to them to make them appear smaller or larger depending on the need.  So you stick Ian McKellen (Gandalf) next to a four foot hobbit hole and he looks huge; stick Elijiah Wood (Frod0) next to a seven foot tall hole and he looks…like a hobbit!

For scenes like Gandalf’s entrance into the Shire with Frodo the scenes were often constructed so that Elijah Wood was positioned ten feet or more behind Ian McKellan, but a straight camera shot he just looked…smaller.  These Hollywood types are a lot more clever than we expected at tricking our eyes!

Apparently accident also plays a role.  In the scene where Galdalf enters Bilbo’s hole for the first time and hits his head on the ceiling – that was not scripted slapstick.  Ian McKellen, in a tiny hobbit hole set, really hit his head and started bumping into things – but he is such a good actor that he stayed in character and they could turn the accident into a real take that helped show the awkwardness of “big people” around hobbits.

IMG_8149The tour ends, as mentioned at the Green Dragon for a spot of beer.  Looking over the pond from Hobbiton you can see Bywater looking pretty much as it does in the movies.

One fact that amazed me the most from the tour guide Jess – she has given tours where as many as 1/3 of her tour group has never seen the movies or read any of the books.  How do you do this?  Why would you do this?  The tour isn’t cheap – seventy five New Zealand dollars for an adult (around $60 US) – and it isn’t exactly in a convenient spot to get to either.  My only guess is that someone booked a “New Zealand Holiday” package and along with the must-see sites like the glow-worm caves, geysers and Maori cultural shows is “Hobbiton.”  It must be utterly baffling though, to be a tourist who can’t understand the English speaking guide for a tour for a movie site with fantastic things you’ve never heard of.

We’ll continue on in the next post to visit Weathertop, the Emyn Muil, Ithilien, and Mordor!

The “backup” holes
More Hobbit holes
The Party Tree
Bag End
Inside the Green Dragon
The bar at the Green Dragon
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