Surf and Turf

Kiwi style

Carpet Shark

Sheep

Sperm Whale

We have spent an interesting three days in Kaikoura, a little fishing village along the north east shore of the south island. Kaikoura is an exceptionally pretty little village situated in a valley in the midst of some coastal mountains. It is a moderately sized valley and has both dairy and sheep farms halfway up the mountains. Once sustained by agriculture and fishing it is now a mega draw for tourists to see and do a number of tours with marine mammals. Kaikoura was also a turn of the century whaling port and there are places where the shore line has been extended into the sea by the build up of soil and vegetation on top of numbers of whale carcasses.

Just off shore is a deep ocean trench, 1000 meters deep in fact, that is home to many deep sea fish, squid, octopi, etc. Due to the abundance of food, it is on a major migration path for a few species of whale as they follow the colder water towards the antarctic in summer and back to warmer waters north in the winter. We are not here in migration season, but as there's is a small population of male sperm whales live here, I did finally see a whale at sea. The waters are too cold for females and young so it is a bachelor population of about twenty whales that return here after mating season and spend the balance of the year. The sperm whale is the largest toothed whale and holds about 2.5 tonnes of oil in its forehead alone. This may be used to help them dive or as sonar for finding prey. We saw two that were on the surface for a short time, they can dive to 300 or 400 meters and usually surface about every 40 to 50 minutes. It was amazing to watch these huge great mammals, they look like a submarine actually, gracefully dive back under the water.

Back for the 19th year

The tour boat I went out on holds 48 people and it was full, the company has five of these and two helicopters that take whale watchers out at the same time, so they have quite a gig going. The company is owned by a local Maori group and is the only whale watching tour in Kaikouri. Loreen sent me off on this tour by myself as she has seen lots of whales off the coast of both BC and Alaska.

There are huge resident pods of both common and dusky dolphins along the edge of the deep trench, again due to large amounts of prey fish, these guys apparently like squid. As part of the tour the whale boat blasted off in search of the dolphins and found pods of them. They like to play and chase around beside and under the boats. The Dusky dolphin is especially playful and are quite entertaining. This was my first sighting of dolphins also and although I took a ton of pictures they are difficult critters to get to pose just right. Not sure which are the Dusky and which are the common, but maybe someone can differentiate. There are a number of companies that take out just dolphin tours and if you are so inclined you can don a wet suit and go for a swim with them.

Acrobats

We also passed by a couple of rocky little islands that were covered with fur seals and their young. These are the same fur seals as we seen in Dunedin. That was one day spent and a good day it was.

We spent the next day hiking out of town on some walking trails and to visit another fur seal colony. Along the way we stopped at a beach side food stand, world famous seaside Bar-B-Q (according to Lonely Planet travel guide) for a delicious fish chowder and half a dozen garlic basted scallops. It was kind of neat sitting on the side of the road scarfing down food at a place that hides the Honda generator behind the trees so they have power.

Next stop was a local sheep farm for a sheep shearing demonstration and a talk about the sheep industry in NZ. The sheep herd in the last few years has dropped from 80 million to about 38 million! Lots of sheep farms have now been replaced by dairy farms and vineyards. Both of these are more viable than sheep farming as the price of wool is not great, although it seemed like the price of meat lambs was pretty good. I am not sure how long it took for this guy to shear one sheep - but it looked like hard work to me! As in every thing there are sheep shearing contests - for the fastest on one sheep, the most in an eight hour session, etc. The numbers are astounding, fastest on one is about 32 seconds and the record for an eight hour stint is, don't quote me, but I think 857. I think I could do three, if I had help.

Loreen making friends

Shearing

It started to rain so a couple kilometers into the hike we turned back to the campground, which was about a four km hike in itself. Back at camp we had new neighbors, a Kiwi couple from north of Auckland. Super nice retired couple, actually quite a bit like us, nice I mean:o). Anyway we had a great visit that evening and the next morning.

One of the things I was really interested in was the hunting that is is done in NZ. I kept seeing these sporting goods stores selling firearms and while we had seen red deer, fallow deer and elk farms, I had always been led to believe that NZ did not have any natural game. Well this is true, but being the sporting gents our european ancestors were it seems they passed this trait on to their NZ descendants and they imported about any kind of game animal they could. Red and fallow deer from Europe, white tail deer and elk from North America, several types of sheep, goat and antelope from Asia and Europe. It is a great climate here, combined with no predators, and these animals exploded to the point where at one time they had to cull the wild deer herds. Today these animals still survive nicely, eat the farmers pasture and hay and roam the mountains and hills. This has made NZ a hunters paradise, no limits on what you take, as long as you take the meat out. There is no season and you do not need a license, as in a tag. This was all very interesting to me.

Meeting this couple has brought on a slight change to our plans as we had not thought about traveling North of Auckland, but now on their invitation we plan to go visit them for a day and look at their part of the world.

On our last day in Kaikoura we went on a fishing trip with Koura Bay fishing charters. What a trip! The owner went out as the mate and had a hired Captain Nick - what a wild man - he did every thing at full tilt boogie. He had full body tattoos and all ten fingers and thumbs were gone at the last knuckle. So being a curious fellow and being able to get all that info about hunting and sheep, etc, I figured what the hell. He told me he got his fingers all chewed by a shark and they didn't heal right so they had to remove them. As he had just told us that if a shark chased a fish we had to let them take the fish as he wanted to catch the shark, I figured he had got them chewed up fishing. He also was missing his left leg from the knee down so a bit later I got up the courage to ask "Nick how did you lose your leg?" "Same shark, Mate," and then showed me some big scars on his belly. "He took me around the stomach and I fought him off by sticking my hands in his mouth, and then the bugger came back to finish me off and got my leg." This happened while partaking in a water sport off the coast of Australia. He was a wizard with a fillet knife and you would never know he was disabled.

Loreen, her fish and Nick

The fishing trip was a great success - we pulled up three crayfish pots and we all got a crayfish. (We did let the little carpet shark go that also came up in one of the pots). There is such a demand from Asia for NZ crayfish that the restaurants here have to pay export price for crayfish, even though they are caught a couple of miles off shore. Crayfish at the market are $50 to $60 and then you have to cook them. A full crayfish in the restaurant was $120. So with Loreen and I both getting one, our trip was pretty much paid for. We caught a lot of fish, Loreen caught two and then got sea sick so could not fish any more. There was a lady from the UK, a fellow from Austria and girls from Belgium and Switzerland. If there was a limit we must have caught it. I caught a blue cod and four sea perch. Ugly but oh so tasty. The blue cod is the "the king of the sea" and very rare as they have been trawler fished out and are just starting to recover. Nick filleted every thing and then Gerard, the owner, invited us all back to his place to cook our cray fish as the others were staying in a hostel and had limited cooking facilities. We cooked our cray fish, and Gerard made us sashimi with ocean perch, and bottles of wine. What a great trip and what a great host. Nick showed up just in time to show us foreigners how to get the most out the crayfish, nothing wasted. We watched and nodded our heads, but when I cleaned ours a bit of the stuff he indicated was like candy, that slimy brown stuff, somehow fell into the garbage bag. Oh darn!

Our cooked Crayfish

Well that is it for Kaikoura, now off to wine country and Abel Tasman national park.