Sails at the edge of the world

Milford Sound receives around seven metres of rain a year, which sounds like a warning and is closer to the point of the place. The rain feeds hundreds of temporary waterfalls that pour off walls a kilometre high, and when the sky clears the fiord shines as though rinsed for your arrival. The tour yachts turn back to the wharf by late afternoon. A yacht stays, and after five o'clock Piopiotahi, to give Milford its Maori name, belongs to whoever is anchored in it.

Two islands, four cruising grounds

New Zealand offers four distinct grounds separated by real distance. The Bay of Islands sits in the subtropical north, with big-game fishing grounds a short run offshore. The Hauraki Gulf wraps around Auckland, a city so dense with yachts it long ago earned the name City of Sails, and whose America's Cup history has left it with some of the best superyacht refit and support infrastructure in the southern hemisphere. The Marlborough Sounds fold into the top of the South Island in a maze of drowned valleys. And Fiordland, in the far south-west, is fourteen fiords of dark water and granite that most New Zealanders have never seen from sea level. The distances between grounds are serious, Auckland to Fiordland being a passage of roughly a thousand nautical miles, so the wise charter picks one or two and does them properly.

The anchorages

The Bay of Islands holds 144 islands in a sheltered arc, with quiet coves at Urupukapuka and Moturua and dolphins working the channels between them. Offshore lie the Poor Knights Islands, a marine reserve washed by a subtropical current and rated by Jacques Cousteau among the great dive sites of the world. In the Hauraki Gulf, anchor off Waiheke Island and take the tender in for a hillside vineyard lunch, or cross to the Coromandel side where Cathedral Cove's stone arch is best reached by sea before the walkers arrive. Great Barrier Island, on the gulf's outer edge, is an official dark sky sanctuary, and the stars above a quiet anchorage there need no telescope. In the far south, Mitre Peak rises 1,692 metres straight out of Milford Sound, Stirling Falls will throw spray across the foredeck if your captain is willing, and Dusky Sound, where James Cook anchored in 1773, looks today very much as it did from the deck of Resolution. In Marlborough, Queen Charlotte Sound offers still water, birdsong and mussel farms selling straight to your galley.

Fiordland is the rare place where the scenery outruns its photographs, and the crowd goes home at five.

Ashore: crayfish, oysters and long histories

The Waitangi Treaty Grounds stand above the Bay of Islands, where the treaty between Maori and the Crown was signed in 1840, and an hour there with a guide reframes the whole country. If you are offered kai from a hangi, food steamed underground on hot stones, accept. The eating elsewhere is some of the best in the Pacific. Kaikoura is literally named for crayfish, kai meaning food and koura the crayfish itself, and it tastes best within sight of the snowline. Bluff oysters, dredged from the cold of Foveaux Strait between March and August, are worth planning a charter around, and off Kaikoura the sperm whales are resident in the offshore canyon all year. Green-lipped mussels come out of the Marlborough Sounds a few hundred metres from where you anchor, and the sauvignon blanc that made Marlborough famous grows twenty minutes from the quay.

When to come

The southern summer, December through March, is the season, with long evening light and settled anchorages in the north. Fiordland demands flexibility in any month, since the weather writes the itinerary there, but responding to weather is precisely what a private yacht is for. November and April are quieter and often golden. New Zealand is a long way from everywhere, which is the whole argument for it, and it pairs naturally with a wider South Pacific season on either side. When you are ready to look at routes and dates, our charter desk can map it with you.