Kayaking North Harbour

How sweet is this?

I'd mentioned earlier that there's a creek down the hill from the new place. Well, it turns out that that creek joins Lucas creek about 200 meters downstream. Then Lucas creek is navigable all the way down to Waitemata harbor, which is only about 12k away.

So the bottom line is that I can put my kayak in at Wharf road (about 5 blocks away), and be paddling the edges of Auckland harbor within an hour. I could go the other way and paddle up to my backyard in a few minutes if the tide is in.


Now I just need to figure out this tide thing. Looks like it slips about 20 minutes later each day. So the one high tide that occurs at a decent hour will be 40 minutes later every day. My book on kayaking the North Island didn't mention any tidal flow or current hazards in the Lucas creek area, but it says it turns into a shallow muddy mangrove slog at low tide. A quick look at the landing this afternoon confirmed that. It looked pretty shallow and mucky even as the tide was coming in.

File Under: New Zealand,