11th March

With such a glorious day as today with sun shining and a gentle easterly Charles and Vicky hit the road again. We took the dingy to a sandy shore in the bay immediately ahead of us - Golden Bay with a view to walk into Oban. As we tied the dingy painter to a tree and made our way up the steps from the golden sandy beach between boat sheds we stopped and talked to one of the boaties: Arthur. He has a 46ft yacht called Elwing which means Star Spray in Elvish. Named after Princess Elwing from the Lord of the Rings. He was intrigued to hear about Vingilot (Elvish for Foam Flower - the yacht that sailed Earendil to Middle Earth to join the Valar in the war against Morgoth)

Arthur among other things runs a little charter business that takes families or school children out for adventures around Stewart Island - he has over the years taken over 5000 school kids from around New Zealand on adventures around Paterson Inlet and Port Pegasus - really nice guy - see www.elwing.co.nz for more.

We walked into Oban and sat on the beach for a while then back up to Observatory Rock lookout - see picture of the bay taken on the way up. We then took a shortcut that joined the coastal walk and then walked back to Golden Bay

As I am waxing lyrical now about the things we have seen and then wonderful people we have met. Vicky and I met two volunteer workers who regularly took a 2 week stint (apparently this happens all year round by the way) to stay on the Island of Ulva in a DOC hut and undertake some of the maintenance of the walks, trap inspections and in this case Painting of one of the DOC tourist shelters in Sydney Cove.

Dinner was chicken and mushroom soup with egg and ham sandwiches - Yum - just rounding off another fantastic day. We will poor over the new weather data that we download each evening at 20:10hrs