Cruising the North and South islands, solo
Mike Delamore faced heavy weather, equipment failure and a knockdown during his 34-day circumnavigation of New Zealand, writes Alex Stone
This morning has been hell. I am too exhausted to fill in all the details but suffice to say we are now running under bare poles in 50-60 knot winds, making 5-10 knots in giant seas. We get smashed fairly regularly by breaking waves but the boat’s fine and apart from a wave that just forced the main hatch open and drenched everything, we are getting on nicely. This was forecast to be 35 knots and it sure as hell isn’t. I hope it eases off soon,’ noted Mike Delamore in his log.
He is one of the few people to have solo circumnavigated New Zealand. This is perhaps not surprising, given the rugged nature of the south-west coast of the South Island off Fiordland, and the south-east coast of the North Island off the Wairarapa, where the trimaran Rose-noëlle capsized in 1989. Her crew spent 119 days adrift on the boat’s wreckage before being washed up on the outer rocks of Great Barrier Island, near Auckland.
New Zealand’s inhospitable coastline and attendant seas were not shy to throw everything at Delamore and his steel Van der Stadt 34 sloop Cavatina too.
But he’s seen it all before. Delamore is regular crew aboard Henk Haazen’s remarkable ice-capable steel expedition yacht Tiama. Together they have sailed scientists to some pretty inhospitable places including New Zealand’s sub-antarctic Islands, to the Balleny Islands, the Ross Sea and to Antarctica.
Delamore has always been around boats, beginning with his idyllic childhood growing up on Great Mercury Island off the Coromandel Peninsula, which his parents owned and farmed.
A VARIED SAILING LIFE
After marrying his wife, Vibhusha, the couple bought the 36-foot, triple-kauri-skinned yacht, Tribute, in 1985. It was built by Richard Wilson, son of the legendary boat builder and sailor, Brin. In the freeand-easy time before children, they sailed Tribute to Alaska and back, via French Polynesia, the Marquesas islands and Hawaii.
Delamore then gained a commercial skipper’s ticket. He’s driven fast ferries and delivered superyachts
across the Atlantic. He served on the ship Braveheart,
which supplied the Pitcairn Islands. He was mate and engineer on the ex-danish royal yacht Galema.
Delamore also owns a narrow boat, Morgana,
which he keeps on the Fens, returning to England during the northern hemisphere summers.
Like many other sailors, Delamore balked at the confines of the COVID-19 lockdown in early 2020, and he began developing an audacious escape plan: a solo circumnavigation of New Zealand. His route would take him counter-clockwise around the country, going up to North Cape first, then southwards down the west side of New Zealand. He chose to go between Stewart Island and the South Island, to be able to stop at Bluff, with its strong tidal currents.
Why single-handed? ‘I was just curious to see how I’d cope with that,’ said Delamore, in his soft-spoken, typically New Zealandish way.
He found Cavatina, complete with a hard doghouse, and paid a pleasing ‘lockdown price’ for the boat. Work then began in earnest for the trip, with new additions such as a full suite of Raymarine electronics, including plotter, radar and 3D sonar, and a new Ai-assisted autohelm. Delamore also serviced the yacht’s engine and checked over all of the sails.
By 4 September, Cavatina was ready to depart her mooring in Matiatia on Waiheke Island.
‘It was a great yacht to do the trip,’ said Delamore. ‘I never worried about the boat, despite being seriously smashed at times.’
As well as the circumnavigation, he also raised funds for the continued restoration of New Zealand’s oldest sailing boat, the 1898 trading cutter, Kate. Years earlier, Delamore had chipped in to help the Waiheke Working Sail Trust buy Kate and begin
restoration. Money was still needed for a new engine, shaft and prop, and his voyage raised $7,000 towards this, as well as raising awareness of the boat.
Many people followed his circumnavigation on the Waiheke Working Sail website, where Delamore kept an online log book.
‘Writing the daily posts brought it all to life. People really appreciated that,’ he explained.
Delamore’s blogposts varied from recording the trivial problems you’ll find on every offshore voyage to equipment failure and sailing through heavy weather.
TAKING A BATTERING
Cavatina was knocked down in 40-knot winds and 5-metre seas, while Delamore was sailing towards Doubtful Sound. ‘I’ve had enough of the last two days of incessant pounding on the hull. The final straw came when I was standing in the doghouse and a giant wave completely buried the boat. I have given up trying to reach Doubtful Sound and am now running directly downwind towards Milford Sound where I hope to find a safe haven,’ he recorded.
He said to solve problems he would verbalise them. Perhaps as a nod to his commercial skippering experience, he would always ask himself, ‘Well, Mike, what would you say in the Court of Inquiry?’ And that would always point the way to a safe solution.
Cavatina was certainly tested on the trip. Just a week after starting the yacht ‘came off the top of a wave that had nothing behind it and all five tons of the boat plus me hit the bottom of the trough with a terrible crash. After I had checked my fillings were still in place, I realised we had rounded up into the wind and looked out the back to see the autopilot ram had broken off its mount. The rudder must have kicked so hard when we hit bottom that it sheared off.’ He also had to fix the engine’s broken cooling water pump, using glued-together fittings from a bilge pump as ‘we heaved through the waves’.
But he was grateful for his choice of boat, especially the doghouse which kept him ‘dry as a bone’.
‘I feel like I am living in some mystical water world where it never stops raining and everything lives and breathes in a liquid medium,’ he wrote. ‘All words and thoughts relate back to the elements of wind and water against the backdrop of the soaring rocky peaks that surround me and whose roots cradle the deep green depths on which I ride. Higher up it is snowing. If it is not raining it is hailing or thundering and always there is wind, lashing spray off the water and tearing the perpetual plumes of the waterfalls into horizontal streaks. It is elemental, wild and beautiful.’
Delamore only stopped twice on his circumnavigation – in Fiordland and at Bluff.
The notorious tidal race at Bluff was a challenge. He took three hours to motor from the entrance to the wharf, against a full ebb. ‘The harbour has a very fast tidal stream running at up to 7 knots at times and with wind against tide I have seen two-metre standing waves in the channel. Today it was average, so I was motoring at 5 knots against a 4-knot outgoing tide.’
Cavatina passed the last cape of the trip – Cape Colville – at 1100 on 7 October, before Delamore crossed his outbound track five hours later and arrived back in his home port. He had sailed Cavatina 2,500 miles in 34 days.
‘The circle is complete: At 1610 I crossed my outbound track, surging into Matiatia in a brisk southwest wind. I rounded up in the lee of the headland, furling the genoa and dropped the main for the last time. After a month at sea, I felt like an albatross folding its wings as it returns to land from its surging across the boundless oceans. On the dock as I glide into the wind, finally engineless simply
because I have run out of fuel, are my dear friends and family. They have come to help and share in what is for me a very moving moment. Their kindness and care touches me deeply,’ Delamore wrote at the time.
He said he found the challenges of solo sailing sometimes emotional and mental.
‘I have sailed 2,500 miles around New Zealand, through triumphs and disasters, challenges great and small, through happiness and despair, through every emotion really. The hardest part has been dealing with myself, with the little mind that wants to give up or complain or be lazy or just feel sorry for itself.’
Mike’s log is a remarkable document, his writing often profoundly beautiful and even poetic at times. Maintaining it wasn’t easy. ‘All these posts have been painstakingly tapped out, letter by letter with one finger, on the tiny keyboard on my phone, sometimes in very trying situations. It has been, in some way, a conversation I have been having with you. I had no one else to talk to,’ he wrote.
To circumnavigate New Zealand, alone under sail, is no small thing. But then, no worthwhile undertaking is easy. So in the end, how does he rate himself as a solo sailor? ‘I can’t say I enjoyed it all the way; it was a good challenge, with some fantastic times, particularly in Fiordland.
‘I had the Milford Sound all to myself, which is pretty unique and there were those perfect moments when the moon was rising or there were dolphins zooming around the boat, and you feel at one with the whole universe. But it was pretty tough. I feel like I have been through the wringer a bit,’ he admited.‘however, I feel better for the experience, cleansed in some way by the wind and the salt spray.’