Shower & Fish and chips in Timaru! Thursday, January 31, 2008

STONY BAY FROM ABOVE
THE WAVES AT SUMNER AND THE FATAL PHOTO THAT WAS BARRY'S UNDOING!
Wow, what an adventure so far! We have a bit of time on a computer thanks to Nigel, Paula, Shelly & Carey who picked up 2 waifs and strays at the yacht club and brought us back to their home so we can write a blog update. Thanks to Dave Weith from the yacht club who allowed us to camp outside the yacht club and luxury-of-luxuries, have our first shower since starting out.

We started well from Sumner Bay in Christchurch with Barry capsizing 17 minutes after staring our 3 month trip! The surf over the bar wasn't particularly big but he took his camera out to take a photo of me, lost momentum, got turned sideways and was suddenly upside down!!

We've had a bit of mixed weather so far, mostly pretty good, almost always super hot, with a bit of a headwind 2 days, a following sea one day and a swell which varied from about 2 metres to less than a metre today. we've seen so many hectors dolphins, cute littel dolpins which seem to always come and play with us if they are in pairs, or more than 2. One day 9 dolphins surfed our bow and darted around between the kayaks for half an hour. One of them jumped right out of the water, perhaps to get a better look at these weird people paddling along relatively slowly! Then about 4 of the dolphins got in a line about 10 metres in front of the kayaks and slapped their tails noisily on the water one at a time!
DUMPING SURF LANDING ( IT ALWAYS LOOKS SMALLER THAN IT IS!! YEAH YEAH!)
Banks Peninsula was really pretty - gorgeous cliffs, indented bays and heaps of wildlife - dozens of dolphins every day, sealions, shags everywhere, plus terns, ganets, gulls, little blue penguins and we even saw an albatros one day. There are loads of little bays so you can always find somewhere sheltered to land, although we didn't chose very well on the first day! we should have seen alarm bells when we saw the name, 'Stony beach' but it looked like one side of the bay would be sheltered. It turned out to be more like 'jagged boulder bay' and there was enough of a swell wrapping round to make it not our best decision! A few scratches on the brand new boats later and we made it safely in, and out the next morning.

The swell increased on the day we didn't paddle with 2 metre high waves dumping on the beach. We thought about trying it as there were very short gaps between the waves but we were tired and hadn't got up early so we decided to take a day to chill out, watch the sea, eat, sleep and go for a little walk. loads of thanks to Richie for entertaining us with his stories, letting us watch him sort his fresh catch of eels out and later bringing us some delicious smoked eel to eat. He met Freya on her way round so that was fun to change stories!! Freya - he saw you on your famous 'launch' where JKA etc pushed you out through the monster waves and he was routing for you, so we told him you made it round.

Right, time for our bed, we'll write more and post more photos when we get the chance. Thanks loads to everyone who has sent us messages on the blog and on our phones - we've recieved texts on the sat phone fine even though we haven't replied. thank you so much to Karel for sending us a weather forecast every day and putting a google map up on the blog, and thanks lots to Alex for updating the blog ( Alex, please can you send me an email cos I foolishly haven't brought your email address with me!)
CAMPING A LITTLE CLOSE TO THE SWELL!! AN HOUR BEFORE A WAVE HIT THE TENT! LESSON 1: NEVER LISTEN TO JUSTINE WHEN SHE SAYS 'IT WILL BE ALRIGHT'!
HECTOR'S DOLPHIN