Visiting the Bay of Islands without a boat is like visiting a ski resort without taking skis. While we don’t have a boat we’re in luck as our friend from St Heliers, Steve, has brought his boat up to the Bay of Islands for the summer.

Steve, a single parent who’s daughter is good friends with Cari, is keen to take us on a fishing tour as a ‘thank you’ to Ruth for helping him out from time to time.

And so, in spectacular weather we tour his favourite fishing spots in the Bay of Islands (marked on his GPS) and over the course of the day catch five snapper, follow a ‘pod’ of dolphins and then collect mussels at Battleship Rock before heading over to Urupukapuka Island for lunch at Otehei Bay – as near a James Bond destination as I have seen.

After lunch we head back out to sea for a spot more fishing and to check the crayfish pots he had laid a few days earlier (nothing caught) before dropping us of Paihia. A great day out.

The following day we join Darran (my mate from Sennybridge who emigrated to NZ several years ago and lives locally) and travel to Tauwhare Bay where his in-laws have a bach (holiday home). What a location, one of the nicest bays we’ve been to on our tour of NZ so far.

We spent the afternoon on the beach, swimming, kayaking and lazing around. In the evening I popped out on a boat with Darran’s brother-in-law to check a long-line (a sequence of 25 hooked lines strung on a long line between two weighted buoys) which he had set-out earlier in the afternoon. Unusually, the technique has only hooked one snapper. In the evening we had supper at the bach before heading back to Kerikeri.

Before committing to a move to NZ to work for Telecom NZ I had spent four whistle-stop days meeting people at Telecom and checking out Auckland and Wellington. On my taxi ride back to the airport for my journey home to the UK the driver had put forward the theory that NZ offers ‘a millionaire lifestyle on a taxi driver wages’. Our last few days in the Bays of Island seems an almost poetic conclusion to our five year journey to prove this theory is true. QED.