the day our boat came in...

Like the teenager late home from a party, our ship finally arrived into the Ports of Auckland a little after 7 this morning, with no explanation for its lateness. We're taking the concerned parent line, choosing to focus on how glad we are that it has come home safely, because we were worried sick about it. Well, our plans were disturbed a little, anyway, if not our sleep.

Feeling quite smug and self-satisfiedly organised we'd booked our gear to sail on the P&O Nedline Encounter (though then we weren't on first, second and third name terms) as we were told it was predicted to arrive in Auckland last Sunday. We were also told we'd then have seven days to uplift our cargo from Auckland, before we started being charged rent by the devanning company. (I've learnt a new word.) As we planned to be in the Waikato for this week, it sounded ideal.

Things began to slide with the call from the teenager from their mobile around midnight, to say they'd been held up. At least, paperwork received from our middle-man company, Oceanbridge, indicated they predicted our ship would arrive on Tuesday, not Sunday. Hm. OK. We consulted with them, and planned a Wednesday trip to Auckland to retrieve our “Twelve (12) cartons and two (2) suitcases” of unaccompanied personal effects. We arranged a relocation to Wellington for Friday, finally meeting for the first time my nephew Fin when we stayed with Tim and Megan that night.

We made the prudent phone call Tuesday night to confirm that our cargo had indeed been unloaded and sorted out from the contents of the rest of the container it was in. The devanning company staff helpfully were able to discuss the finer points of their job with me, clarifying the difficulty in doing this when the boat itself had not turned up in Port. Oh. Re-arrange week, moving Thursday appointments to Wednesday, planning to go to Auckland Thursday.

Repeat same procedure Wednesday night—boat remains AWOL... though with a prediction now that it would arrive this morning. Unloading and devanning would mean gear not available till Friday (here's the ominous bit) at the earliest. So everything put on hold; departure for Wellington postponed. We hope to collect our gear tomorrow... Online tracking and a phone call later in the day confirm the container is now at the devanning, um, depot? which is a start. They appear to work 24/7, and are confident we will be able to get our gear. So we're booked to go to Auckland, first thing tomorrow. Now we just have to clear Customs and particularly MAF. So I'm wondering, why on earth did we ship those two wooden ornaments?