I had thought to call this story ‘Navigational Error’. As you will see from the date at the end, our return from New Zealand came when we were all having to understand the word ‘Covid.’
Here is Kaiteriteri with its sandy beaches and coves all the way to Totaranui. They let you sit on the upper deck if you like, if there is room, for that is where most people like to sit in the hot weather. Sometimes, even on a day with clear blue skies, it can become too cool as the boat heads north and the breeze blows hats and hair all awry.
Inside on the lower deck, a few of us are content to drink the free coffee or hot chocolate and eat a sandwich and choose a moment to walk outside and look along the bow to where the water rises and falls and splashes those who are too bold.
The captain talks to us with the free flow of one who has done all of this many times.
Time to put in at the first bay, direct the bow up onto the beach……….down with the anchor, then down with the boarding ramp which unfolds and flops on the sand to allow the first passengers to disembark while keeping their feet dry.
I had talked to the two young Americans sitting near us that morning, applying their sun lotion while listening to their guide.
He tells us, “Next stop for us, guys, but the rest rooms ashore won’t be very good, so use the ones on the boat.”
They are much younger than us, planning, as they are, to do the ten kilometre walk through the forest. We talk of the pleasant warm conditions they will have, not like their home near Chicago where recent temperatures have touched minus forty, enough to freeze the lungs and kill those daring to breathe air in which boiling water is frozen in an instant. The friendly young Americans want me to translate minus forty into degrees Fahrenheit and shiver to hear me speak of what I heard on the news about how, in the Dakotas, the wind-chill makes it like minus fifty four.
But off they go while we stay aboard for a view of Adele Island where the fur seals are basking on the rocks or chafing with a flipper to rid themselves of pests. We mean to stay on board to sail farther north to Anchorage (that safest harbour) and Medlands Beach, for we are planning to have one day free from walking.
There will be more stopping places along the coast, more dropping-off places for those attempting this walk or that before making a rendez-vous with a returning boat some time in the afternoon.
In due course we see Arvaroa Bay and Totaranui at the end of this particular journey, the first settlement made a century before by William Gibbs. I look out seawards and think of those fortunate to have seen a whale on this run and know it will need some sort of miracle for us to do so. I look out on what might be the open ocean and yet I am safe in the comfortable knowledge that this is Tasman Bay and we are not so very far from the North Island.
I have friends who have seen whales and it is easy to understand how that might be. Perhaps if I had been braver and tackled the truly deep water, we might have seen the sperm whales diving for squid; my mind thinks what a meeting that might be somewhere out there in the world of beyond. I think of that wonderful television piece where Sir David saw his first blue whale and think it might not be too hard after all to sense the wonder of getting so close.
There will be a different sort of adventure, however. Soon after the return journey commences, our captain brings us safe ashore in Arvaroa. It is easy to be ‘safe’ in such warm, calm conditions. As people are coming aboard, I look at the young man on his quad bike with its trailer loaded with bags. Meadowbank Homestead is a lodge nearby but out of view for those on this golden beach which makes the baggage look out-of-place with nowhere it might belong. The young driver is more interested in his dog with which he seems to be trading jokes as he throws a stick for it to retrieve.
Who wants the bags then? Are they not to come aboard? Or are they to wait there for eternity?
A few of our passengers have gone ashore. Their plan is to walk a short distance along the beach to find the lodge and then explore one of the forest trails. For the forest is never far away in this Abel Tasman Park.
I am still watching them as our pilot revs the engine and our boat begins to reverse, as it has several times already, when there comes a bang that is like the death knell of an engine.
Try again, pilot; but the members of the small crew already know the signs are bad and, sure enough, we are drifting now, though no great distance and in no way to cause alarm. The crew will come and go, the way people do who would rather give no explanation about the delay.
Those of us looking at events that now unfold in the stern of the boat, see the shaft and the propeller laid bare as a hatch is opened beneath the feet of the pilot who now becomes a diver as he investigates though he knows already about the unfortunate truth. For somehow, as one of the young women from the crew tells us, we have set the engine in motion before the anchor was properly up and now the anchor rope is twisted in a death grip strangling the propeller blade.
Try this - try again – another dive. How cold that water is on what is otherwise a hot day and so the pilot turned diver gets chilled in making his investigation; and yet how he strives to free the strangled propeller – gets a nasty cut in the process – and frozen too in the deceptively cold sea. He has to stop and they wrap him in blankets and give him hot drinks, though this is a far cry from that frozen day in Michigan.
Time passes. We passengers have drifted about fifty feet from the shore. No fear for us of freezing or drowning with our beach in sight and other boats coming and going on a clear blue day.
Here comes a smaller vessel marked with the name of the same firm that owns ours. One of their crew dives in and we see him swim the thirty strokes across to help our people with the fight to free the rope.
Time passes.
They keep trying and there is another choked start from the engine. There is no danger, but we wonder how much longer as the first hour passes.
Disentangle the anchor rope – just as well it is rope and not a chain. More false starts and still no freedom……..until……………….and then……
This time!
The roar of an engine those on board had thought of as the norm in the earlier part of the voyage.
How might it have been for Abel Tasman? Not so much on the coast of this national park that bears his name, but as it was centuries ago in boats too small surely for the open ocean. What had they thought and felt, how had it been, touching the shore of this mysterious, unknown land?
As our engine finally roars again and hurries us back along the coast, it is worth thinking of the perils Tasman and Cook must have known with no engine, but sails instead which might often have obeyed the whim of directional forces.
Yes, I think, how might it have been for those early adventurers, with none to tell them more of this extraordinary land. What did they make of the great whales for they must have seen some? Sad to think that they would have viewed the mighty sperm whale as the target for a harpoon rather than as one of the inviolable lords of the deep.
We still have further stops on our return journey, though there is now a plan to put us all ashore at the next place - where is it now? and have us returned from there by water taxi to Kaiteriteri.
A small tourist group from Germany are unsure of this plan. Though I once studied German at school I have let it weaken and fear using it to use it conversing with native speakers. Still, I risk a fumbling explanation that we will soon be off this beach and in a wassertaxi hurrying back to Kaiterteri.
How is that those of us who turn up early and strive to explain to others who are struggling, end up at the back of the queue?
And so there is no room for us on the taxi boat. This means that at least we don’t need to get our feet wet but can board a bigger boat and get ready for one last short voyage.
Our original boat has gone now, spirited away for repairs. There are fewer on this new vessel. Why not have a wander on the upper deck and see the finely coloured water of Tasman Bay, and wonder again how those early mariners made their fabled voyages centuries before.
Here on the deck of this rescue boat, looking out from the stern, the foam and roar of the water we leave behind tells that we are to lose no further speed. The shore is a mile to port as we head south, but I can’t help looking out to sea once more and try to think of the whales singing.
Those Germans had seen the little penguins and dolphins which are natives of this place – and they’d see the cormorants and the fur seals; but so had we and my wife had filmed them all. It occurs to me that most of New Zealand’s native animals are small. If only the moa could have survived, at least long enough for Cook to have seen it. But think of the tuatara in their vivarium in the natural history base at Franz Joseph. To look at these ancient creatures is an art in itself as they might sit out a century with only enough movement for the occasional meal or a carefully considered laying of eggs. It will be much later that I consider these reptiles with the extra eye and how my thoughts were on them just before the last meeting of the day was upon us; for who could have expected it would be a meeting greater than any other? Greater than the land-slip that had nearly blocked us on the west coast road, greater than the other fall that had closed the pass to Doubtful Sound only days after we had crossed it.
Greater than these? Have I remembered it truly? Why yes for it was as great as a mighty swell that might have turned the boat; as great as the surprise which brought the eight ton giant who surfaced just that once, just as a pilot might only once reverse into his anchor rope.
How could the whale have come so close to view us without anyone seeing until it seemed he must collide and tip us into the sea?
But oh the power of that mighty ocean voyager as he surfaced in the Tasman Bay – just once to appear with a mighty blast of breath and the flash of the white facings against the black body, and a dimension to scare us as its appearance does when it lifts from the steep beach in Patagonia, a size to fit the awesome power of a creature that had turned in an instant to make up for his one navigational error, the power that would let him come and then be gone in an instant.
But there he is again! already fifty kilometres away with another gasp of air, now a hundred kilometres, now further still, never again to steer so falsely, never again to come so close, as close as the kraken’s awakening.
Close enough for no one who glimpsed him there, myself as much as any, to ever forget him; for now I could say I saw him.
5th March 2019
28th April 2019