fish filmin'

We slept in a bit this morning, encouraged by our comfy cots and mattresses, and awoke to find it had been raining for a while. Unfortunately, the rain disrupted the charter schedule since the 7 am charter was a film crew, so we weren’t able to go diving in between the early morning and noon charters since the crew had the boat on stand-by. As we were having a cup of tea with Gerard the film crew rang again, saying they’d be ready in half an hour, so he was heading out and we planned to be on our way up north when he asked us if we wanted to go out in the boat when they headed out to meet them. We, of course, were up for this, so we jumped in the car and headed to the wharf where Nick met us with the boat. We had zero time to prepare, so unfortunately I wasn’t able to grab my camera.

The boat had been chartered by two Frenchmen working on a nature documentary, and this bit of it was meant to capture an American PhD student, studying at the University of Otago, using specially-designed microphone buoys to monitor whale sounds. The Frenchmen and their Kiwi interpreter got on the boat with us and we chased the research vessel around for a bit, then went to go see the seals and pull cray pots just for some variety. When we were pulling up the cray pots there was a huge octopus in one of them that had poisoned the two biggest crays – greedy bugger! Apparently they poison them in size order, and THEN go back and eat them. Sometimes they’re punished by being turned into bait, but this one got clemency for some reason. After the film charter, Nick and Gerard had another fishing charter so Ann and I took Gerard’s car back to the house with the interpreter, and wrote up the invoice for the film crew. That sounds ridiculous, but I’m not very surprised by stuff like that any longer – why would someone give two people he met less than a day earlier the key to his new car, access to his house, trust them with handling money for his business, etc.? The answer, I’ve found, is because this is the South Island (and a small town, to boot) and that’s just what these crazy-friendly people around here do.

After writing out the invoice and dropping the interpreter back off with the crew, we made grilled cheese sandwiches, did a final battery charge-up session, and hit the road. We drove through Blenheim, and made it to Prenzel (liqueurs, oils, sauces, etc.), Makana (boutique chocolate factory) and two wineries before everything closed. We picked up some groceries in Picton, then drove very indirectly to our campsite at Aussie Bay – DOC’s directions were a bit off, so we found it on our second pass. We cooked up leftover perch in some smoked garlic sauce we bought at Prenzel – delicious!

Photo: A Royal Albatross (in background) and other albatross/mollymawks in front, from

yesterday's boat trip