FRIDAY QUIZ – Win a Great Prize

OK woodys the first person (HDK you are out) that can answer the 2 questions below wins the prize:

1. Name the style of the rig on the above woody

2. ID (name) the vessel

Now if no one gets the vessel name by midnight tonight (Friday)  – the prize goes to the first woody that named the rig correctly.
All entries via the ww comments section.

AND ITS A LATE – 7.00am POST – to be fair to snoozers

THE PRIZE
A copy of Kerry Howe’s just released book – To The Islands. Below is a review of the book by Harold Kidd (review also appears in Boating NZ)
I’ll let HDK tell you about the book – but I have read it & its very good, having cruised around the gulf for many years I thought I knew the history behind the islands, turns out I did not 🙂 I also found the section on the early settlement of NZ by the Maori’s compelling  reading. Buy the book.

TO THE ISLANDS, Exploring, remembering, imagining the Hauraki Gulf by Kerry Howe, Published by Mokohinau Islands Press.

There have been several good books on the islands of the Hauraki Gulf, and most of them are in Kiwi yachties’ libraries, but none of them runs as broad and deep as this one. It’s destined to be a classic.

Kerry Howe has recently retired as a senior academic and author of standard works on the Polynesians’ sea-going craft, their navigation techniques, their migration patterns and their world view. He and his wife Merrilyn have a Townson 30 which they use much more than most people do, but Kerry got his Hauraki Gulf fundamentals from his extensive sea-kayak voyaging. So we see a slightly different perspective, rather closer to rocks and sea level than usual.

The book is a series of essays, in the manner of Thoreau’s Cape Cod, but even more accessible. These are acute observations of all of the islands and rocks of the Gulf, interspersed, for example, with personal reminiscences of his happy childhood at Narrow Neck, the arrival and impact of both Maori and European settlers on trees, birdlife and fish stocks, many facets of the adventure of cruising and sailing, and the basic human search for paradise.  There are negatives, in the historic human despoliation of the islands’ pristine ecologies, but big positives in stories of the present energetic restoration of many of the islands to their pre-contact plant and bird and fish life.

So it’s no plodding travelogue of the Gulf; it’s a magic carpet showing you the sweep of geological and human history of the Gulf and its islands. And there’s an awful lot of the wisdom of Kerry Howe in it. That’s no bad thing because he’s thoroughly worth listening and nodding to…….. unless you happen to drive a plastic gin palace with a mind-bending stereo that you must share with others at anchorages…….. but then you’re unlikely to be buying this treasure of a book!

To the Islands spoke loud to me because of my common background with Kerry in a North Shore childhood, the consequent maximum exposure to the sea and sailing in all sorts of craft, and as an old Pacific hand.  I think it will speak loud to all of the readers of this fine magazine and merits a place on the bookshelves of all New Zealand yachting families. Thoroughly recommended!