Heading up north...continued

As I continued to head up North I came to Whangarie where I went Scuba diving at Poor Knights Island, an hours boat trip out to sea. The wheather was still rough with a mighty high swell and raining, and for the first time in my life I felt sea sick, Four of the people on the boat where being sick, into little paper bags, no throwing up over the side allowed as it is a marine reserve, so you can't leave anything behind.

We found a sheltered bay and the diving was absolutely fantastic with an incredible amount of fish in every direction, seaweeds cling to all the rocks and in amongst these tiny tripple fin fish, sea anemones and nudibrancs (beautifully coloured sea slug type things), unfortunately I don't have any photos of these. I did two dives during the day and during the first dive the weather changed and when we surfaced it was in to glorious sunshine. The journey back to the mainland was lovely and calm, like a Mediteranean cruise (I imagine, on a nice day that is).

Well my journey North zig zagged across the country and my next stopping off point of interest was Oponini , on the west coast where I partook in a little sand boarding, which is a little like snow boarding but on huge sand dunes, several stories high and ending up in the sea at the bottom. This was absolutly fantastic fun, but resulted in some interesting friction burns!

From here I travelled back to the East of the country to the Bay of Islands, where I had 2 more scuba dives, this time going down to the wreck of the sunken Rainbow Warrior. The Greenpeace ship that was sunk by French Government agents because Greenpeace was objecting to French nuclear testing in the Pacific. The wrecK was towed to it's current resting place and scuttled to create an artificial reef. It is a lovely dive and it has been colonised by all manner of animals. We also swam inside and it was quite spooky looking deep into the body of the ship and to have hundreds of pairs of fishes eye staring back.

From here I travelled to the tip of Northland to Cape Rienga the nearly Northernmost point of the mainland, in the same way as John O'Groats is nearly the northern most point of the UK mainland, when in fact we all know it is actually Dunnet Head! Hooray! I camped a couple of kilometres from Cape Reinga, where nearlly all the mosquitoes in New Zealand seem to go for their summer holidays. I camped with the rest of them (20km to the south) over the following week at Weitiki Landing where we where based for more bar tailed godwit surveying.

Did you know that there are mosquitoes that suck the blood of other insects, that's why they can do so well even when there aren't mammals around. And here's another funny thing, there are midges that suck the freshly sucked blood out of the mosquito. Not in NZ but somewhere, I know because I read it in a book.

Anyway getting back to the bird surveying with the New Zealand Ornithological Society. We spent 5 days tracking the large flocks of Godwit, the area is one of the main feeding spots in NZ before they start their journey to reach their breeding grounds in Alaska. The plan had been to do mist netting on a peninsular to catch and ring the birds, but unfortunately due to unforseen circumstances a sufficient number (ie more than one) of experienced bird ringers could only be present on the last two days of the week. So for the start of the week we tracked down the flocks of wading birds, mainly bar tailed godwits, red knots, banded and NZ dotterels, wrybills, turnstones, verible and pied oyster catchers, and with the use of telescopes checked their legs for indentification rings, in order to plot their movements around the country and the world. The scenery was absolutely fantastic.

On the second to last night four of us took a small boat (which had been ferrying us about all week) out to a small shell bank, in the middle of the estuary, and set up a number of mist nets. Basically very fine nets strung between poles up in the air. As the tide rises, during the night the birds are forced of their feeding grounds and fly over the shell bank and into the net. Where they are disentangled from the net and put in holding boxes then fitted with identification rings (called bands over here), measured and weighed and the such, then released. We had an incredibly successful night and where working from 4pm when we boarded the boat for the 15 minute boat trip until 7am the following morning when we arrived back at the jetty, with next to no time doing nothing. We caught and processed about 100 birds through out the night, of various species. Pretty hard work. This was far in excess of the numbers we expected so we decided that as we were all shattered, having expected to be in our beds by 2am, we didn't need to go out again the following night. So I headed south towards Auckland to be ready and rested for my meditaition course which started in the evening of the following day.

And that tale will wait until my next entry.

Evening All

Nick