The World Of Woodbury: Sailing on Boxing Day

Bright and Early the day after Christmas (or Boxing Day since we're in a former British colony) we were up and out the door... and ran into this on our drive out of the resort.

Yep, that's a herd of sheep returning to their pasture after a nice morning walk. Standard fare here in New Zealand.

We drove a ways down the coast to the Bay of Islands where we chartered a sailboat for the day. Life vests for all the littles- and a personal escort for Isla since she's not got very trustworthy sea legs yet.

The boys were not impressed with our leisurely sailing even though the adults enjoyed looking at the coastline, feeling the sun and the breeze, and just relaxing.

But they found cozy enough spots to sun bathe.

It was really an idyllic morning.

And fun to capture cute pics of my kids.

For lunch we pulled into a little bay with lots of other sail boats.

Isla was enjoying being rocked to sleep by the waves so she and Taylor and baby Ezi (who was also asleep) stayed on board while the rest of the group went ashore....

...to build sandcastles!!! Finally!!! Isaac got his birthday wish if only 2 days late. And since he'd been talking about it for so long and he and Miles kept claiming this aunt or uncle for their "teams", everyone jumped right in and made this little 6 year old the happiest kid around.

Mack, Grams, Miles and Isaac worked on one while Esther, Arty, and Ethan worked on another. Grandpa rested his leg in the sand and "supervised" construction.

They worked on them for about an hour.

Since I was the official photographer and not a participant I took a stroll over to the other side of the peninsula which in this case was a whopping 10 feet or so. Above you see the sand, then there's maybe 10 feet of grass and then a separate beach on the other side with its own laguna.

Someday we'll have to go back and kayak when our kids are older. Those little caves and rocks are just calling to be explored.

But for now everyone's happy to just build sand castles.

Here's Ethan's group's final product- complete with grass flag.

Taylor finally joined us when Ezi woke up, but Isla was still zonked and never made it to the beach.

Sadly, Mack made 3 different castles because they advancing tide kept destroying them. Isaac didn't mind helping and their castle had higher walls and more caves.

Since Taylor had missed most of the time on the beach, he hiked up to a lookout and got some great pictures while the rest of us cleaned up and got ferried back to the boat. Breathtaking.

And then we were back on the boat but this time with a headwind. And since I'm not a sailer I didn't realize that that would mean we'd be tipping ourselves almost to the point of falling in the water every 5 seconds.

That's a boat heading the same way as us and in fact it crossed our path several times at similarly freaky angles as our own.

Sadly, the first time we tipped over was without any notice from our captain. The morning's trip had been completely calm and flat and so we'd started letting the boys walk around the boat without holding an adults hand. Unfortunately the first time we tipped, Miles was downstairs getting a snack and flew across the room and smacked his forehead pretty bad on the table. Arty was downstairs too so he wasn't completely unsupervised but he was holding Ezi and couldn't get ahold of Miles to stop him. So Miles got a nice shiner and then he got to "drive" the boat so everyone could keep an eye on him.

See? Lots of parental supervision now. But look at that steep angle.

Taylor spent the whole ride back holding onto Isla which was very good because we kept switching which way we were tipped and it was really a crazy ride.