Departures: New Zealand 2004: Old Salt in a New Bay

Tue Dec 14 2004

There were two signs posted at the front of Hansen's proclaiming the hours of operation. One said that the place opened at 6:30. One said that the place opened at 7:00. I was outside carrying my huge disreputable bright orange duffel bag. It was 6:50. Which sign should I trust? I pushed through the door, asked the lady: "Howdy. Are you open?" "No, but why don't you go ahead and sit down anyhow?" Maybe they weren't open; but maybe the meaning of "closed" wasn't exactly what I thought.

Soon I was full of breakfast, leaning back in my chair, digesting. I watched fog blow over the water. I watched the fog evaporate. I watched more fog blow over the water. For minutes at a time, the fog was scary-thick; and then it was gone; and then it was back. I hoped we wouldn't sail through much of that.

I was ready for the next guided activity. I had signed up for a three-day sailing cruise with EcoCruz. I lost yet more footloose-traveler credibility by doing this; nevertheless I had a lot of fun.

I sat and watched buses disgorge tourists. Paihia was a pretty town, and many people knew that. Maybe I was glad to be leaving town after all. And I walked out of Hansen's and down to the dock, where I encountered the ship's crew.

People

The crew of the Manawanui were: John the captain who loved orcas; Martin the laconic kiwi who was good at sailing and fishing; and Daniel from Oz who cooked and was funny in the kind of way that made you want to push him into the water unless he was being funnny about someone who wasn't you (which was most of the time). Moby the dog liked to ride at the front of the zodiac. Captain John had swum with tuna. Daniel, a world traveler, wanted to work his way across Canada and reach Germany to see the 2006 world cup.

Other passengers showed up. Ben and Karen looked like they lived healthy. Kirstie was from Wales. Neely lived in Kauai, where she designed water ponds and waterscapes--like landscaping, but specializing in water features. Ben and Karen were a couple. Kirstie and Neely had met each other while traveling; one of them had talked the other into signing up for this.

I hadn't talked anyone else into signing up. I don't think I could have credibly convinced anyone to sign up for an organized sailing trip. I'd only been on one--and it had been not much fun, thanks to many many whiny fellow passengers. Now I looked at the other passengers on this trip warily.

Aboard

We went by zodiac to the Manawanui, which was anchored out in the bay. Soon there were snacks and motoring. We went past some blue penguins. I spotted a pod of dolphins and pointed them out. I was surprised to be the first person to spot them--usually it's someone else. Maybe that whale-spotting trip in Monterey had taught me something. Moby got excited as the dolphins got close. Captain John said that Moby could hear the high dolphin whines through the hull of the boat.

The dolphins left. A while later, there was a strange froth on the surface of the water. The crew said that this was a fish swarm. That didn't make any sense--why would a swarm of fish roil the surface?

We went around past the Hole-in-the-Rock, over to the vicinity of Cape Brett. Eventually the Manawanui would anchor in Te Toroa Bay (I think, based on some peeks at the charts the next morning).

While most of the passengers snorkeled, I decided to go kayaking. I'd heard about the ship's kayaks. I hadn't known that these were sit-on-top kayaks. I didn't know what a sit-on-top kaywak was until I saw the one I was about to get onto. Then I recognized it--I'd paddled one of these in Hawai'i.

Specifically, I'd paddled one of these thinngs in Hawai'i with three friends, one of them a lifeguard. We hadn't known much about them, but we were young and immortal so we'd paddled out from shore. A skilled paddler can keep a sit-on-top kayak upright when a wave crashes over it; we were not skilled paddlers, and it didn't occur to us to think about waves--until a wave came along and wiped us out. I had spat out some water, reached out, grabbed my kayak. Our lifeguard friend paddled up, wanted to know if I was OK. I was OK. She went paddling off to check on the other people--we'd been scattered. She felt responsible. I wasn't sure what the big deal was. I flopped and wriggled up onto my kayak, realized my paddle had drifted away, flopped off the kayak, retrieved the paddle, flopped back onto the kayak. Not pretty, but not bad. Oh--and I had a couple of little coral cuts. Another of our group had not fared so well--he had been pulled over more of the coral, and had some nasty gashes. No wonder our lifeguard had seemed so worried...

Now it was time to get back on that kayak. I didn't see any waves breaking around here.

Soon I was splashing around a little bay, wondering if my knees were supposed to get in the way of the paddle so much, or if that was a symptom of being tall. For a while I stopped and rested and listened to the sounds that the wavelets made when they wriggled through fissures in the cliffs--a semi-rhythmic slapping and whistling.

Then the snorkelers were done snorkeling and Daniel took us all out paddling along the cliffs. Watching my fellow paddlers, I figured out why their knees didn't get in the way of their paddles--their legs were shorter than mine. That probably didn't surprise anyone except me. We saw some twisted white trees on shore. These were killed by opossums. You might have heard about imported opossums, with no native predators, wreaking havoc on New Zealand's ecology. That sounds bad enough in the abstract, but it was sad seeing those bare dead trees.

Then we hopped in the zodiac and went fishing with Martin. Yes, this vegetarian went fishing. And I'm glad I did. Because we ended up in the middle of a fish swarm. What is a fish swarm? Here's what I understand. Sometimes some big fish will chomp on a school of little fish. The little fish swim upwards to get away. They run out of water. Then there is a froth of fish on the surface of the water.

This was one of the most magnificent things I'd ever seen. We were on a low boat, close to the water. There was a "whoosh" as fish started to break surface. And the "whoosh" continued as the fish kept coming. All around us was a sea of bubbles, fins, splashing, wide eyes flashing and disappearing. We were atop a living cushion of moving particles.

Eventually the swarm stopped and we were back to the business of catching fish. Yes, this vegetarian helped catch some fish. Get over it. I called it a learning experience. I held a rod and reel. I helped set lines and later helped pull them in. It was kind of icky, but plenty educational.

Dinner was great. I was still a sufficiently rude vegetarian so as to not eat the caught fish. Dinner was nonetheless yummy.

After dinner, Neely said she was coming down with a cold. I gave her one of the humungous cold pills my mom had foisted on me at the start of my trip. It didn't help.

Wed Dec 15 2004

I slept in, didn't wake up until a little after 6. I headed up on deck and watched the fog blow around. I remembered the fog from the morning before. It had blown in, burned off, blown in, burned off. Where was the sun to burn off this fog. I looked up. It started sprinkling.

There was not much wind, but plenty of gray. After breakfast, we motored around to the West side of Cape Brett. The snorkelers snorkeled. I took one of the kayaks, paddled it to shore, and hiked a bit. When I was done hiking, I had to paddle the kayak off the beach. Captain John had come to shore in the zodiac, and anxiously watched my progress as I tried to paddle away from shore--and instead repeatedly beached the kayak. He had just ambled over to offer assistance when I stubbornly put on a great burst of paddling--and made it out to deep water, where the waves stopped giving me such a hard time. Eventually, I made my way back to the Manawanui.

It was windy and rainy--it was good weather for sailing. So we sailed. The visibility was not great. But I had a great time. There were big waves, and the ship rolled a lot--at one point, I hugged a mast to prevent myself from falling over. Rain soaked me. Then the rain stopped, and the wind dried me out. Daniel said he wished Moby the dog would stay inside when it rained--to avoid wet dog smell. But it was a lot more fun being outside than inside.

I learned something about sailing, and did not quite wreck the ship in the process. I learned that I didn't know how to take a loop of line off of a winch as safely as I thought. When you work with lines and winches, you want to make sure that your fingers, hands, and arms don't get torn off. Fingers sometimes get torn off if you get them in between some line and a winch and then the line gets jerked. So when you handle lines, you try to keep your hands a ways away from the winch.

I'd developed a technique for unwrapping line from a winch without getting my hands close--I'd flick some slack along the line, and then pull up, pulling a loop off the winch. It was a nice move--on boats with smaller winches, with smaller lips on those winches. The Manawanoi had big winches, and when a flicked enough slack along the line to take off one loop--well, that was enough slack so that the whole line escaped up off the top of the winch. So I found myself holding onto one end of a line, the other end connected to a flapping jib sheet, plenty of slack in the line. I cursed, chased down the line, somehow got the line back on the winch without falling overboard. And then, because I hadn't figure out what I was doing wrong yet, I did all of that again.

I am not exactly sure why the crew didn't maroon me at this point. But the good news is that I did then figure out how to get line off of the big winch one loop at a time, without endangering my fingers or my fellow humans--don't try to fling the line like a lasso. Instead, bring my arm around, always keeping the line somewhat taut.

We anchored. Neely had stayed in bed, feeling sick with that cold. Now she emerged. When asked how she was feeling, she said "a little better." But I think that's because whe didn't want to listen to the sympathetic clucks we would have made if she'd said "still pretty sick."

Dogs are not allowed to walk on most beaches around the Bay of Islands. The Cricket Patch was not an island--it was a patch of very shallow water. For a few hours most days, it was above water--but not officially land. And thus, Moby was not forbidden to walk on the Cricket Patch. So we went there by zodiac. This place was Moby's personal flush toilet, but the rest of us wandered around to look at rocks and such.

Captain John told us that we were anchored in Parekura Bay, but the chart said Slaughter Bay. Now that I'm back at computer and can find a Maori-English dictionary online, I find out that "parekura" means "slaughter". So I guess we weren't lost, after all.

Over dinner conversation, we looked at photo albums full of local wildlife and found out a bit about each other. Ben had been fishing since he was ten. Karen taught French. Kirstie encouraged British tourists to use public transit. Neely hung out with Natalie Merchant.

Captain John talked about Orcas. He really liked those orcas. Listening to him, I got the impression that he liked plenty of aquatic animals, but thought that their highest purpose was to become orca food. Whenever someone spotted an orca, they were supposed to call up the local orca research organization, run by Dr Ingrid Visser. Captain John was saving up the proceeds from these tourists rambles, hoping to get some free time to offer a research cruise to Dr Visser et al.

Thu Dec 16 2004

We went for a walk on Urupukapuka island, whose plant life made no sense--there were some trees like those I'd seen in Abel Tasman, but there were also large fields of tall grass. Only when I heard the history of the place did it make sense--people had brought sheep to this island to graze. They'd planted quick-growing African grasses so that the sheep would have more to eat. Then the national parks had got the island back. Without sheep, the grass was growing long. And the native plants were coming back slowly.

We sat and ate lunch on a high pasture. I guess I was watching the weather with half an eye because I noticed a storm blowing in. I tensed up. Should we hurry back to the ship? Then I noticed Captain John noticing the storm--and saying nothing. The storm was a ways away--why tell the tourists to pack up their lunch earlier than necessary? Maybe I was getting better at spotting weather--but I still needed to learn how to respond to weather without getting flustered. I sat and watched the storm and chatted. When Captain John said that we should head back to the ship, we headed back.

Back on the ship, we sailed back to Pahia through the rain. It was raining pretty hard, and I stayed in the wheelhouse some. But when I thought, "When am I going to get a chance to come back here again?" I went back outside and enjoyed the rain.

Ever Onward Towards Dinner-Time

There were goodbyes on the boat; goodbyes on the dock. Then I made my way back to the Seaspray lodge, picked up some take-away from Ruffino's, which was nicely garlicky.

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