Auckland Day

Last Monday, 28 January was Auckalnd Day. Everyone had told us that the harhour would be filled with sail boats and that we did not want to miss it. We made plans to go to the Anderson's apartment so we would have a bird's-eye view of the event. Elder and Sister Watson and Sister Hamula and her one son came. (They are in the area presidency.) We had a lovely breakfast of french toast, scrambled eggs, bacon and fruit. I think we can all say that that was the highlight of the day. Actually we were all a bit disappointed with the sails but what we did see was fun.

It started off with a tugboat race. I suppose you could ask the question: how exciting could that be but there were so many different tugs. Here are just a few pictures.

I loved this one. This was the very smallest one. I seem to think there was a story once about a tug boat maybe called Scuffy or somehting like that.  

There were several that looked just like this one.  And they were all the same size too.  The black thing on the top is a water hose. It spraying water for awhile later on in the day.  

This was the biggest of them all and by a large measure.  It was also the most decorated and seemed to have lots of people riding it as well.  Later on in the morning all the tugs were in demand to move out a large navy ship.  

But we had come for the sails so here are a few pictures of some of them.  

You can see the marina in the background. Now if all those boats had been out sailing it would have been a sight to behold. This is just a sampling of what we saw. I really liked the one right in the center.  

This one on the right was fun to watch. He would did wheelies in the water and you could see the wake he left behind, usually a perfect circle. You can just see a bit of it there.

This one just looked really interesting to me. It seems to have more sails than some of the others.  As we have watched people take their small boats or wind sails out of the water at Takapuna we have realized that to own a boat like this is a huge commitment. They can spend over a hour putting it all away and rolling up the sails etc.  Lovely to look at but to own?  Probably not!