Bay of Islands

We've got 5 days to play around now, so we went about 3 hours north to a little town called Paihia on the Bay of Islands.  It's about 50 miles from the northern-most tip of the North Island.  As the name would suggest, there are a bunch of small islands out in the bay, some have a few scattered homes, but most are uninhabited.

It's a beautiful spot, but once again, the weather wasn't being very cooperative.  Cool and drizzly.

We took this jet-boat out for a ride among the various islands, but clouds and mist rolled in to the point that we really couldn't see much, and the trip was cut short.

We did get to see Cook's Cove, which is on Motuarohia Island.  It's said to be the place where Captain James Cook first anchored upon his arrival to New Zealand on October 6, 1769.  In 1768, the 40 year-old Cook was chosen to lead a mission to the South Seas to observe the 1769 transit of Venus (they wanted to use the data to try and estimate the distance between the Earth and the Sun).  A separate and secret part of the mission, revealed to the crew only after they captured the information on the transit, was to search for evidence of unknown southern continents.  Cook and his crew were the second known Europeans explorers to visit New Zealand (after Able Tasman in 1642).  Cook arrived first at this spot, and then spent the next 6 months circumnavigating the islands.  He was the first to map the entire coastline of New Zealand.