A lovely Summer day, and a picnic on the beach with friends...a bit of pleasant sailing thrown in just to remind me how incredibly lucky I am.
Barrier Landing is about an hour and a quarter from us by displacement boat. Beachcomber had all three sails set, but the breeze turned onto the nose and the narrow Reeve Channel was fairly well attended by planing boats (appearing to be late for an important appointment), and tacking across all of them repeatedly upwind was a bit tedious, so we kicked the little diesel into life and set her to idle and that gave us enough way to pinch into the wind higher than she could have under sail alone, with sails and motor both contributing to our passage along with Badger- who has the more grown-up 3 cylinder diesel to push her along.
Before heading off we called into the local fuel jetty to fill the tank with diesel. I honestly can't remember the last time I did this- maybe August last year- but she only took seven dollars to fill her up. I'm told the little Yanmar sips 0.5 litres per hour at around five knots.
The Barrier is a strip of beach on the lakeside of dunes that face Ninety Mile Beach on the east coast for, well, ninety odd miles. It is an easy walk across the scrub covered dunes to the ocean, but we were more than happy to set up near the boats for lunch and swim in the salty, tidal lake.
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