Hawk in Dunedin, New Zealand
25 February 2005 | Dunedin, South Island, New Zealand
We arrived in Dunedin on the southeast corner of the South Island of New Zealand on Monday morning after a fast, downwind run from Stewart Island in 30-40 knots of southwest wind. Under the double-reefed main and poled out jib, we were surfing down the wave faces at 12-14 knots and averaged close to 10 knots for most of the 150-mile passage. After something over 1,000 miles of windward work, all three of us were punch drunk on the exhilarating speed, reveling in sailing free and racing with the waves instead of pounding our way into them. When we arrived at the Otago Yacht Club, the Commodore told us that we'd been reported the day before by the VHF station at the Nuggets, a rocky point fifty miles south of here. "There's a yacht out there just flyin' along. Goin' like a bat outta hell!"
Since our last update, HAWK passed south of Southwest Cape on Stewart Island, the large island off the southern end of the South Island, putting the last of the five great capes in her wake. We spent a month in four of the thirteen fjords and another three weeks in Stewart Island.
Depending on how you count them, there are a total of from ten to twenty fjords in the southwest corner of New Zealand. Unlike in Chile, where the subsidence of one mountain range and the upthrust of another have created several drowned valleys between the two, here in fjordland the terrain results from glacial activity. The glaciers extended westward from an ice cap that used to cover all of the Southern Alps. They cut and carved these chasms out to the sea, most more than 500 feet deep over much of their length. From north to south, the fjords gradually get lower and less rugged. Milford, the furthest north of the sounds, is a huge tourist attraction in part because it is the highest, steepest and most canyon-like of the fjords. Steep hills rather than mountains surround the southernmost fjords, Chalky and Preservation, and these are neither so deep nor so rugged as their northern neighbors.
Three days after leaving Nelson, we arrived in Thompson Sound midway between Milford and Preservation just in front of a northwest gale. We found ourselves running down the channel in front of 35-40 knots if wind in bright sunshine and almost unlimited visibility. Knife-like ridges rose straight from the water to rocky crags some 3,000 to 4,000 feet high on either side of the narrow channel. These rugged peaks were clad in a dense tangle of rain forest broken in many places by white slashes against the darker green - the raw rock of landslides and broad seams of granite on which nothing could grow.
The wind followed us for six miles right around two right angle turns, though it did ease off to 25 knots or so with higher gusts. At the head of Thompson Sound, we tucked in behind a small island and the wind died away, leaving us floating in a calm pool only occasionally ruffled by a gust. It took us several hours to get ourselves situated with two stern lines. We were confused by the fisherman's solution down here - a line right across the cove we would have backed up into - and couldn't figure out exactly how they used it. As we were getting the second stern line set up, a boat came in and tied alongside this line, so that answered that question. One of the people from the boat rowed over with fresh crayfish (lobster) and invited us for a drink. A true Fiordland welcome!
That first night left us wondering why the area wasn't overrun with tourists, but we soon had the answer. The fjords have two predominant features - the rain and the sandflies - and if one isn't getting you then the other one is. We thought we'd seen rain after wintering in Ireland and Chile, but the Sounds took us to a whole new level of experience. In one 30-hour period, it rained so hard that it filled our dinghy almost to overflowing - close to ten inches of water. There was so much runoff that the top several meters of water in the sounds was fresh. Any day when the clouds rose to the tops of the peaks lining the channel and the rain diminished to a steady drizzle counted as "nice." The sandflies were pervasive but not very hearty and succumbed quickly to any sort of attempt to get rid of them from mosquito coils to repellant. But they still swarmed us whenever you went on deck, and we cleared them away with an impatient swing of the arm which, we were told, is called "the Fiordland wave." The sandflies only went away completely when it was really pouring...
But then, on our last few days in the channels when we were anchored in Dusky Sound in the same harbor where Captain Cook and his crew spent a month aboard the RESOLUTION 230 years ago, a high pressure system came in over the South Island, and we could see all the way down the fjord to the snow-capped Southern Alps in the interior. Pure magic...
Here's hoping you're finding some magic of your own,
Beth and Evans
s/v HAWK