Kayaking the Abel Tasman Coast - Day 1

We got up, packed and drove to the place we had booked our two day kayak trip. Our guide was a lovely young woman named Frazier, and our group included a young English couple (the lady was a zoologist who had just finished working in Tanzania tracking migration patterns of large mammals and her fellow was a taciturn lad who said he would do architecture if he went back to work), and a young German husband and wife who didn’t mention what they did but were, quite simply, lovely to be around.

The tidal ebb and flow is about 12 feet at Marahau, so the kayaking companies have tractors to pull the trailers that carry the kayaks down to the water. It was low tide when we went out. The water’s edge was about 150 yards from the rock wall at the edge of the road.

After careful instruction we got in our kayaks, secured our spray skirts and began our sea kayaking experience. The weather was beautiful. A little windier than the day before, but still quite outstanding. We paddled along under Frazier’s guidance while she identified the birds and bushes we saw. We saw lots of oystercatchers, cormorants, a couple of gannets and several types of beautiful gulls. The gulls here look like the gulls at home, but somehow neater, tidier and more delicate. Some have red feet, legs, beaks and circles around their eyes. Others are twice their size, with black wings and backs.
It was fun to see from the shore the terrain we had seen on our walk, but our paddle went quite a bit further than our walk. We stuck close to the shore This kept us mostly sheltered from the wind which was blowing from the Southwest at about 10-15 knots. Frazier told us this was a light wind, and that the forecast for our next day was even better; 10 knots but with a variable direction.
We went around one headland called the “wild mile.” Frazier warned us about it because it is exposed to the winds blowing in from the Tasman sea, and can be difficult to kayak. We had only a bit of wind and a slight chop; I teased Frazier about Kiwis calling those conditions “difficult.” As the next day's events would prove, I should have kept my mouth shut.

We got into Anchorage Bay about 3 pm. We made two stops along the way, one for tea and one for lunch. We had arranged to stay on the “Cat-a-rac”, a motorized catamaran with two decks that has been converted into housing. We pulled out kayaks out of the water, carried them up to a rack, hung our spray skirts and spray jackets out to dry, and said goodbye to Frazier. We then caught the launch out to the Cat-a-rac.

We were the first to arrive. The Cat-a-rac is owned and run by a fellow named Chris. He’s a Kiwi in his 30s that Miriam acknowledges could have been in the cast of Baywatch. We made the booking blind, without asking questions. It turns out that the Cat-a-rac has at least two levels of accommodation. One level consists of bedrooms with doors, windows and double beds. We had not booked one of those. Instead we had bunks quite literally below decks. To get to where we slept we walked forward as far as we could go on the lowest deck, then grabbed a hefty wooden railing for support while we lowered ourselves down a hole onto a rusty metal ladder that descended into one of the hulls of the catamaran. Just above the ladder was a lovely brass sign that said “crew.” Our hull had six sleeping spots; four single bunks along the outside wall of the hull, and one double bunk at the end that ran crossways and was up above the others.
Since we were first we picked the double, spread our gear out on it, grabbed our bottle of wine, and headed topside.

We sipped wine from cups and watched the shore as people began to arrive. The first person we met was a single, athletic looking fellow from Germany. He was on holiday, but he works for a German fitness magazine, and does articles on travel destinations for fitness buffs. It turned out he had visited the Nike campus in Beaverton for one of his assignments.

Next was a doctor and lawyer couple from Texas. The doc was a gastroenterologist who had owned his own practice and retired. His wife went to law school after their kids were out of the house and taught in a law school afterward. He was in NZ on a six month stint in a teaching hospital. They were both bright, articulate and very good at making conversation.

They were walking a portion of the Abel Tasman trail with a guide. It had not occurred to me that one could, or should, hire a guide to walk a trail, but they were wildly enthusiastic about their guide, who also was staying on the Cat-a-rac.

We talked to him for a while. He knows a lot about the area, but was born in Scotland. He makes his living doing guided walks out of Takaka (he pronounced it “Tar-kaka”), and was quite charming. We took his number and brochure, and thought we might use him for a one day trip into the Cobb Valley.

Chris fired up the barbecue and cooked venison burgers, sausages and a tasty corn casserole. We ate it happily and finished the bottle of wine.

Afterwards Miriam talked to the doctor and I talked with a couple from Belgium. He was a retired teacher from Belgium. She was an administrator for the foster child care system in one province of Belgium. It turns out, not surprisingly, that foster care in Belgium has the same major problem as in the U.S.: not enough qualified, willing parents. They were taking a five day holiday together in NZ; she was then going back to work, and he was spending another couple of weeks doing a bicycle tour of a portion of the South island.

We climbed down into our hull-hole relatively early that evening. Getting into our bunk took coordination. There was only about two feet of headroom (you could not sit upright) and you had to climb up a lower bunk to get in. Miriam wanted the outside, so I got in first. When we both were in we bonked our heads on the ceiling arranging the covers and drifted off to sleep.

At out age we do not sleep the entire night through without visiting the comfort station. In this case I could only reach the comfort station by sitting up, bonking my head again on the ceiling, clambering over my sleeping wife quietly in the dark so as not to wake the other person who was sharing that hull with us, clambering down onto the floor, pulling on my shoes so as not to hurt my feet on the rusty ladder, clambering up the ladder, and then out along the deck to the comfort station. The return trip required everything to be done in reverse. It was dark on the deck and pitch black in the hull-hole, so when I started to go down I mistook where in the hole the ladder was and almost slipped down. In short, the trip to the john was a memorable experience. So memorable, in fact, that Miriam, having tried it once, decided she would rather die of thirst than do it again just for a bit of water.

But here’s the interesting thing. It really was a lot more fun to sleep down a hull hole in the deck than it would have been to sleep in an ordinary, comfortable bedroom.