day 7 - more fiordland

The next day we headed to Pickersgill Harbour, AKA Cooks Cove. As you can see from the plaque this is where cool moored for a while in 1773... pretty cool history!

The Rata tree which they used as a gang plank is STILL THERE! after over 200 years, the tree is even still alive... wow!

You can see the the in this copy of a sketch which was made at the time. We walked up the hill and you can even see the tree stumps (covered in ground ferns now of course!) where the trees were cut down by Cook's crew to create their observatory.

A view from the observatory hill back to the Totoku

I also realised that on the Rata gang plank that Cook had used, there were native orchids flowering - could it get any better or more geeky???!!

Back to the boat and we motored on to our next location. The rain came again, heavy but short lived

Chris, Si and I went for a paddle and headed up a river which was pretty cool. We couldn't get more than about 600m up it though as it quickly became shallow and too rocky.

Si and I paddling back to the boat

I went snorkeling and saw lots of cool stuff - MASSIVE starfish

More of fiordland's tasty Blue Cod!At the same time some of the guys were scuba-ing to catch us more crayfish and I played with their bubbles :P

Felix fishing with me under him - I didn't scare the fish that much cause they still caught heaps

Oh look it's me!

I found this very cool bright blue seaweed

Cray gatherers hard at work

And I even saw some of fiordland's famous Black Coral (better pic). It's called Black Coral because it turns black when it washes up on the beach and dies - it's normally pure white. It's pretty special stuff because as well as growing slowly like other corals, it normally only grows in very deep, dark water. However in fiordland it grows quite close to the surface (the one I saw was only about 2m deep) Want to know more?

Mmmm pretty

Because it rained every 10 minutes for the first few days, there were waterfalls everywhere. It was so nice just motoring past them all slowly, drinking my G&T. This is the life :D

Or it was... I am of course now back to reality, and tomorrow I need to go to my thesis site (yet again - I'm sure I could get there blindfolded now) to take some more samples... Come back tomorrow though and I'll also reminisce about the next day of my trip. Here's a clue - DOLPHINS!!!!!