Kayaking the Abel Tasman Coast - Day 2

We woke reasonably early, but each of us thought the other was still asleep, so we didn’t move to avoid disturbing each other. That meant we were practically they last to get up. We had instant coffee (which tasted very good) and waited for space to open up at the breakfast table. We had cereal, toast, peanut butter and marmalade, and more coffee.

The other couple at the breakfast table with us were from England and in their 20s. They came over to NZ for an extended holiday, working long enough in each place to get enough money to go to the next. They had just spent about six months working in Christchurch in a Mexican restaurant. We enjoyed their company so much we lost track of time, and didn’t get off the Cat-a-rac and onto the beach until about 9:20 am.

By that time all the people and kayaks on the beach were gone. Our kayak, a large, plastic, heavy, two person kayak full of gear, was about 20 yards up from the beach and waist high in a rack. I was a bit apprehensive, but with Miriam’s help it was easy to pull it off the rack and skid it down to the water.

As we were getting into the kayak the nice young English couple arrived on the beach – they were last off the cat-a-rac. They were surprised we old folks were kayaking (we were the only people staying on the Cat-a-rac who were kayaking -everyone else was walking). We felt proud to have surprised them.

We got into our kayak and set out on our day of guideless, “freedom” kayaking. It was 9:35 am. We had gotten a bit of a late start, but not bad. We were scheduled to meet a water taxi at Onetahouti Beach at 3:30 pm, and Frazier had told us the trip should only take us about three and a half hours. The brochure says four hours in calm water for experienced kayakers with no stops.

We were at the South end of Anchorage Bay, and the bay itself was mostly one long, sandy beach, so we decided to kayak straight across the mouth of the bay and then start hugging the coastline and enjoying the scenery. That worked fine, but we had a bit more wind and chop than we were expecting.

The point at the Northern end of the bay was rocky, and waves were breaking both on the point and a bit offshore. I was sitting in the back and doing the steering, and decided we could go between the offshore rocks and the point. The gap was about 20 feet wide and the waves were rising and falling over a foot. We could see rocks under the water in the gap, but I was pretty sure they were deep enough to let us through. We paused just before the gap, I yelled to Miriam to paddle hard, and we surged through the gap easily.

It made us feel good to do that all by ourselves.

Then we looked ahead.

The kayak company provided us each with a large scale, brightly colored, laminated map of the area, only slightly smudged and blurred because of moisture. The map indicated that there were frequent beaches all along the coast. And Frazier had shown us the bright green signs with yellow lettering that were placed on each beach, identified the beach and gave directions to public toilets and such. There were lots of beaches, each with nice, barely pronounceable Maori names, shown on our map.

However, as we rounded the Northern point of Anchorage Bay we couldn’t see any beaches with nice green signs. Instead we saw 1 foot chop with a stronger onshore wind than we had felt the day before, blowing about 15 degrees to the starboard of our course. This meant it was blowing into each of the inlets and signless beaches we could see, giving us no sheltered water.
And this meant I wasn’t comfortable paddling us close to the rocky shore, because we would be constantly at risk of being blown onto the rocks. Seeing the rocky shore up close is, of course, the primary reason to kayak the Abel Tasman coast.

Traveling along the rocky coast takes a lot longer than traveling in a straight line between the rocky points at the end of the bays. Since there was no inland water that was sheltered from the wind we decided to take the shorter route and head for the next point, in hope of finding sheltered water beyond it.

We made it to the next point, only to find more unsheltered, small inlets with onshore winds and no nice green and yellow signs. So we paddled to the next point. We rounded it and found the same, and so paddled to the next point. By this time we had been paddling two and half hours without stopping, all into the wind and in a chop that was as high as our kayak. Miriam was getting quite wet and cold from the spray coming over the bow, but she didn’t want to pull into shore to change because the parts of the shore where we could beach the kayak were a long way out of our way and we were beginning to get concerned that we would not make it to our destination in time to be picked up by the water taxi.

I was trying to keep track of our progress, but I couldn’t be sure where we were because we couldn’t see any signs on the beaches (leading me to suspect we had not yet come to any of the beaches shown on the map), and because the map was too blurry to make out coastal details. I guessed that the next point would only be about a third of the way we needed to travel, and we had been paddling for more than two and a half hours.

We decided we would round that next point and go into shore no matter how it looked. We were tired, cold and we needed to eat.

The last point was the hardest. It was a blunt, rather than a sharp, point, which meant it took a long time to get around, and it was completely exposed. We paddled steadily and hard. We both watched the shore. We each noticed that it wasn’t really clear that we were making any forward progress at all. We each refrained from telling this to the other. I started paddling harder, using up the strength and energy reserves I had been saving. It made a little difference, but I wasn’t at all sure that I could keep it up. As nearly as I could tell from the map, the point we were rounding was only slightly more than a third of the distance we were supposed to travel.

We rounded that point and saw: a narrow inlet and another point. We didn’t want to go into the narrow inlet because it was a long, long way in, so we paddled on, into the wind, getting more and more tired. We finally rounded the last point and saw a long beach with a lot of kayaks on it. We paddled toward it. Miriam asked what time it was. I told her about one fifteen. She said that we would never make the taxi. I agreed. We were a fair way offshore and it seemed to take forever just to get to the beach. We were trying to make land before the other kayaks left so we could find out where we were; we also hoped that we would find a guide with a telephone, who could call our water taxi and change our pickup point.

We beached the kayak and struggled out. Our muscles were too tired, and our bodies too cold and hungry, to move well. We must have looked like we were 102 years old.

After we beached the kayak I staggered over to the group of people who were sitting on the beach next to their kayaks. A nice young Kiwi came over to me. I thrust our crummy, blurry map at him, and asked plaintively “What beach are we on?”

He said something I couldn’t understand. I was still have trouble understanding Kiwi when people say just a few words. I need to hear at least several words to get my translators working. I said “Excuse me, what beach did you say?” He repeated: “Onetahouti, mate. This is Onetahouti beach.” I poked my cold, sandy finger at our destination on the map and croaked “Are we here?” He grinned and said “That’s right mate.”
I hobbled back to Miriam with the good news. We had paddled all the way to Onetahouti in one windy, cold, choppy, tiring slog. We were there two full hours before out pickup time!

We got back in the kayak to go a few hundred yards to the pickup point on the beach. On our way the wind died, the clouds thinned, we felt warmer, and a seal actually surfaced and lazily rolled around about 30 yards from our kayak. When we got about 10 yards from the beach I finally saw one of those green and yellow signs. I hadn’t seen them before because they blend beautifully with the foliage at the edge of the beach.

We pulled in at the pickup point where we met the lovely German couple we had started out with. We were mightily gratified when they volunteered that they found the day’s paddle very difficult. They were much younger and more experienced than us. While we were paddling we all had seen some other people on a one day guided kayak and water taxi trip, headed the opposite direction from us, cruising effortlessly with the wind behind them, pulled along by a sail. The German couple agreed with us that it was really hard to see those bums sailing home while we were battling the wind and waves.

We ate lunch, lay down in the sand, took a nap, and waited for the water taxi. We actually got warm, although Miriam cheated, changed into a dry shirt and put on about three layers of clothing. We tried to figure out why we got lost, but decided maybe it was for the best. If we had known where we were we probably would have stopped at one of the beaches along the way. If we had stopped, it’s not clear we would have had the energy to get back in and keep paddling.
The water taxi picked us up right on schedule. It’s an all metal boat with a big engine and space for perhaps a dozen people. The skipper lashed our kayaks to the gunnels crossways at the back of the boat, and headed on his way. By this time there were larger whitecaps out where we had been paddling, and the boat bucked and kicked in the swells.

The water taxi took about half an hour to cover the distance we had taken two days to paddle in the kayak.

We drove back to the chalets, checked in, and drove down to the café at the entrance to Abel Tasman park for dinner. We had pesto quesadillas and a carafe of red house wine. It hit the spot. We then drove home and hit the