South Island Sojourn

Beth A Leonard

(Beth and Evans left the US East Coast in 1999 aboard their 47ft aluminium Van de Stadt-designed Hawk and have since passed south of all three – or five? – ‘great capes’.)

Somewhere between 600 and 1000 foreign yachts clear into New Zealand every year, and of those only a handful ever venture south of Auckland. The cruising boats all cluster within 200 miles of where they cleared in, and many of their owners spend the cyclone season recovering from the Pacific crossing and doing boat work rather than touring New Zealand. Until now, that has included me and my partner, Evans Starzinger – by November of 2004 we had spent a total of more than a year in New Zealand over the course of two visits on two different boats, but we’d never been south of Auckland. Last time, we told ourselves the boat wasn’t really up to the rigors of the Southern Ocean or the damp chill of the fjords. This time, we didn’t have the boat for an excuse – after a year in Chile, Hawk had certainly proven her ability to handle high latitude sailing. So we promised ourselves that before we left we would head south to explore the glaciers, fjords, mountains and wilderness of the South Island.

Our Kiwi friends gave us lots of advice on how to get down there and on where to go in the fjords and Stewart Island. They all recommended heading down the west coast of the North Island to reach the fjords instead of sailing the sheltered east coast. By waiting for the summertime high pressure systems to fill in, they said, we’d be able to ride a northeast breeze down the coast and not have to fight our way against wind and current up Cook Strait between the North and South Islands, or through Foveaux Strait at the bottom of the South Island. We arrived in Whangaroa at the top of the North Island just in time for the last OCC-organized event of the 50th anniversary year celebration. We enjoyed a pleasant few days getting to know the many OCC members who had gathered for the celebration, including old friends Graham and Ann Evans of Fyne Spirit whom we had last met in Iceland three years earlier.

Summertime was slow in coming, and it was three weeks after the last OCC event that we finally got some northerly winds. On Christmas Day we realised the window would be shorter than anticipated, when we heard on the radio that the Sydney-Hobart Race Committee had just warned the fleet to expect storm-force winds and large seas by the end of their first day at sea. We set off immediately, and three days later beat the storm into Nelson, at the top of the South Island, by less than 12 hours. We arrived to the news of the tsunami and several e-mails from worried friends. We did not notice anything at sea, but the New Zealand weather authorities measured several waves of about two feet in Jackson Bay, 300 miles south of Nelson. That the wave was measurable here at all, some 5000 miles away and on the opposite side of Australia from the epicentre, attests to its power. We have had news from most of our friends cruising Thailand, and they all survived unscathed though with hair-raising stories. All of our friends were utterly numbed by the devastation ashore, hardly able to find words to describe it. Whatever misfortunes the cruisers may have suffered pales in significance compared to what these countries have lost, and to the incredible task of rebuilding that now faces them.

Nelson is a small town of 50,000 people that caters to the South Island tourist trade. Nestled along the banks of a small river which winds its way around 2500 foot wooded ridges, the ten-block-square city centre bustles with pedestrian traffic (which has right of way over the cars), and hanging baskets of colourful flowers line the narrow streets. We arrived to find the annual jazz festival in full swing, and got to enjoy the Saturday fruit, veggie and crafts market, just in time to provision for the next six weeks or so away from civilisation. Pouring rain made the market pretty soggy. In fact, in the twelve days we spent in ‘the sunniest place in New Zealand’, we had two days of sunshine. Everyone assured us that this had so far been the worst summer in memory and promised it would change soon. But we weren’t around to see it when it did – we got another good weather window about ten days after we arrived in Nelson and set out on the 400 mile leg down the west coast of the South Island.Our objective: the 13 fjords which project like long fingers up to 20 miles into New Zealand’s Southern Alps.

Depending on how you count them, there are somewhere between ten and twenty fjords in the southwest corner of the South Island. 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 neighbours. Only two of the sounds can be accessed by road – most of the area is reached only by float plane or by boat out of the Southern Ocean.

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 of wind in bright sunshine and almost unlimited visibility. Knife-edged ridges rose 3000 to 4000 feet straight from the water on either side of the narrow channel, to culminate in rocky crags. Their 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, including 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 several hours to get ourselves secured with two stern lines. We were confused by the fisherman’s solution down here – a line right across the mouth of the cove we had planned to back up into – and couldn’t figure out exactly how they used it. As we were getting our 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), fresh blue cod and an invitation for a drink. A true Fjordland 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 – rain and 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 10 inches of water. There was so much run-off that the top several metres 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 repellent. But they still swarmed over us whenever we went on deck, and we cleared them away with an impatient swing of the arm which, we were told, is called ‘the Fjordland wave’. The sandflies only went away completely when it was really pouring…

When we could see it, the scenery more than made up for the rain and the sandflies. After our arrival in Thompson Sound we had a straight week of continuous rain. When it finally eased from a deluge to a drizzle and the clouds lifted high enough for us to catch glimpses of the tops of the peaks, we sailed to the head of Doubtful Sound and Hall Arm, reputed to be one of the most beautiful in the sounds. That day, the sunlight spilled down through the clouds in long fingers that brushed across the pewter sea, burnishing it silver. The 3000 to 5000 foot peaks lining the channel receded into the distance shimmering like a mirage, their shoulders abutting one another until they merged with the grey of the clouds. A dense tangle of temperate rainforest made up of indigenous trees with exotic names like rimu and rata covered the steep slopes. Where this vegetation gave way to the steepness of the terrain, cascades of water plunged down sheer faces of scoured grey rock and irregular seams of granite. In some places these falls were nothing more than lacy plumes swept away by the wind before they reached the bottom, in others they were fully-fledged cataracts growling in a low voice as they tumbled for hundreds of feet. At any given moment there might be anywhere from three to a dozen waterfalls within sight, their delicate white tracery appearing like lace worked into the green and grey faces of the knife-edged ridges.

We left the last of the sounds we visited – named ‘Dusky Bay’ by Captain Cook as he passed it by in 1770 – and headed for Stewart Island at the very bottom of the South Island. Our friends had advised us to go straight to Port Pegasus at the southern end of the island. This avoided the notoriously big seas and strong currents in Foveaux Straits and let us run downwind to the other major port, Paterson Inlet, on the northeast end of the island. We passed under Southwest Cape at the tip of Stewart Island under a bright full moon. While most mariners consider there to be three ‘great capes’ – Horn, Hope and Leeuwin – some count two more, Southwest Cape on Tasmania and Southwest Cape on Stewart. Whether there are three or five, Hawk has now passed to the south of all of them.

While Stewart Island lacks the awesome grandeur of the fjords, it possesses a certain homey charm that reminded us of Newfoundland or the Outer Hebrides. In Port Pegasus we were surrounded by low hills covered with knee-high scrub, punctuated by odd mounds that jut up unexpectedly and end in great domes of granite rock. Most of these are less than 1000 feet high, though some might reach 2000 feet or so – nowhere near the height or grandeur of a single peak in Doubtful Sound. But what Stewart lacks in grandeur it more than makes up for in wildlife. During our first morning we spotted blue penguins, fur seals, white-fronted terns, the Stewart Island shag and the rarest, most endangered penguin species in the world – the yellow-eyed penguin. When our Kiwi friends described both the fjords and Stewart Island, they spoke of the fjords with a mixture of awe and respect, but they spoke of Stewart Island with real affection.

We spent another three weeks exploring the two large inlets on Stewart before heading for Dunedin on the southeast corner of the South Island. For the first time in more than a year we enjoyed a fast, downwind run in 30–40 knots of southwest wind. Under double-reefed main and poled-out jib we surfed down the wave faces at 12–14 knots and averaged close to 10 knots for most of the 150 mile passage. After something over 1000 miles of windward work all three of us were punch drunk on the exhilarating speed, revelling 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 previous day by the VHF station at the Nuggets, a rocky point 50 miles to the south. “There’s a yacht out there just flyin’ along”, they’d said. “Goin’ like a bat outta hell!”

Now we’re in the midst of provisioning for the ‘Z’ shaped run east across the Pacific. We’ll leave Dunedin when the cyclone season tapers off and head for the Austral Islands, south of Tahiti. From there we’ll make our way to Hawaii and then to Vancouver, where we plan to base ourselves next winter.