This text was read by OCR from a scanned newsletter and has not been proofread yet, so expect odd characters and mistakes.
s I had spent Easter last year kayaking around D’Urville Island, it seemed appropriate to . go paddling this Easter to stay consistent.
This trip was good in that all of the organisation of transport and food was done by someone else. All I had to do was organise my boat and gear and turn up at the ferry terminal at the appointed time.
The terminal at Wellington wasn’t quite as bad as it could have been, but as we went down on the Friday morning we missed most of the crowds. A smooth, boring trip to Picton had me champing at the bit to get going. The guy that the others were hiring their boats off met us at the beach by the Edwin Fox. His boats are quite interesting. He has designed and built them himself, and he has added flotation compartments to the side of them to give them extra stability. Overall, they are very well made and very seaworthy, and at $30 a day are the cheapest boats in The Sounds.
When we eventually got off the beach, I decided that given the wind direction and weather forecast (not that you can rely on that) we would head west to a campsiteattimungata-Bay;downtowards Anakiwa. It took us about three hours to get down there in conditions that the beginners found a little bit trying, plus being very close to being run down by a jet ski. The campsite is very nice. It is situated night by a stream, with good grassy areas to pitch a fly. By good put itoutforus. _ fortune we camped on the eastern side of the stream, as the Queen Charlotte Walkway runs through the clearing on the other side. There are only three negatives to this campsite, one, at low tide it isa fifty metre carry to shore; two, the number of very cheeky possums; and three, the absolute lack of firewood.
On Saturday it took a while to get going as it was very cold, and it took a long time for the sun to hit the fly. It was a beautiful day with no wind so we headed back up The Sounds heading for Kumototo Bay. I had visions of fresh fish for dinner so I was trailing a spinner behind my boat, but all I caught were lumps of drift wood so I gave that up as a bad job. The lack of sea and bird life was very disappointing. The only things we saw all day were two seals and the usual shags and gannets.
We didn’t make it to Kumototo Bay and instead camped at Kaipakirikiri Bay. This isn’t as nice as other campsites in The Sounds, with a patch of grass just big enough for a fly. The great thing was that there was plenty of firewood around so we had a massive fire on the beach. We placed it just right so as we were going to bed, the incoming tide
Sunday morning dawned overcast, cold and windy. The wind had turned to the southeast so it was blowing straight into the bay. We were heading for Waikawa Bay, as that is where the guy who has the boats is based, so we paddled out to Alports
By Tony Stone
Island to get out of the wind and used it asa shelter to get out into the main channel before the wind hit us. It was simply hard work getting across from there to Waikawa, plus there was the added complication of avoiding the ferries. With three Interislanders, the Lynx, the Straitrunner, and the Straitsman there was a lot of traffic to keep a look out for. Anyway, we got across without causing a major maritime disaster and found our way to the jetty where the boats lived. It was ' at this point that the service really began. Colin (the owner of the boats) had been keeping an eye out and before we were out of our boats, he was there I with a trailer to carry them up to the motor camp. He served up hot cups of coffee with bikkies . and gave us the run of the shower in his house. He then I gave us a lift back to the motor camp in Picton with our two boats on his trailer. Given the extra help he had given us, I felt quite guilty that we were staying somewhere else!
The motor camp was fine except for the fact that we had stew out of a can for tea that night, and the people next door were frying steak. It was great to be able to I get out for a run that night, after not being able to stretch the legs” for three days. Once again the trip back on the ferry was a boring three hours and the drudgery of sorting out wet gear at home detracts from things a bit, but all in all it was a good trip.