VictoriaMarch 13
After a night of pouring rain in Te Anau, we awoke to some sun peaking through the clouds and set off on our short drive to the Port of Manapouri for the start of our overnight cruise with Real NZ to the remote waters of Doubtful Sound.
At the Manapouri dock, we boarded a boat that took us to the West Arm of Lake Manapouri, about an hour’s journey, where there was also an enormous power station built in the 1960s that supplies most of the region’s electricity.
From there we tried to swat the sandflies as we hopped on a coach for an hour-long bus ride on a gravel road that took us through a rainforest and up across the Wilmot Pass, where we had our first glimpse of Doubtful Sound and Stella Falls before our driver dropped us off at Deep Cove, population 0.
Our bus driver Tony shared a wealth of information about the area. He was a former fire fighter of 39 years and had so much passion for his job and this part of NZ. He loved sharing it all with us.
We learned that the road we were driving on was a 13-mile gravel road that was the most expensive to build in NZ at $55-60 per cm. We drove through beech forests and rain forests covered with vivid green moss and ferns.
We finally reached our ship, the Fiordland Navigator, our floating home for the next 24 hours along with 70 other passengers.
We boarded, had our safety briefing and we were shown to our outside cabin, a small comfy room with a tiny en suite bathroom.
We joined the other passengers on deck as the boat pulled away from shore into the fjord. It was a rare sunny day, unusual for Doubtful Sound, where it’s considered one of the wettest places on the planet with more than 21 ft of rainfall annually or rain on about 200 days a year. In 1983, Doubtful Sound set the record with over 51 ft of rainfall that year.
Doubtful Sound is located in the southwest of the South Island in the Fiordland National Park. Not technically a Sound but a fjord, in 1770 Captain Cook did not enter the inlet as he was doubtful it was navigable by sail due to the strong prevailing westerly winds and that’s how it got its name.
The whalers and sealers who discovered the area didn’t have a word for a fjord, which they also misspelled with an “i” later on, not a “j,” and so they called it what they knew back home – a Sound. Marlborough Sounds at the top of the South Island are the only true Sounds in NZ.
Doubtful Sound is the deepest fjord in NZ at a depth of 1,381 ft and is 25 miles long. The fiord has three main arms, three marine reserves and is covered in thick rainforest where native plants thrive along with countless birds.
As we learned along our trip, a Sound is carved by a river and a fjord is created and carved by a glacier. When the glacier retreats, sea water fills, creating new bodies of water called a fjord. The other key difference is that a fjord drops off from the edge of the shoreline and quickly gets very deep. Essentially, the mountains you see above can be as deep as the valleys below the water. A Sound has shallow shelfs along the shorelines and they are not as deep as fjords. For these reasons, both the Sounds and the fjords are so spectacular to witness as the topography is breathtaking.
The captain steered the boat towards the Tasman Sea for us to see the fur seal colony on the Shelter Islands and they were there lounging on the rocks.
The water started getting choppier and my stomach protested. I instantly regretted single-handedly polishing off the smoked salmon on the charcuterie board just moments earlier.
I cranked up my sea sickness watch another notch, increasing the electrical current traveling to my wrist, hoping to calm my stomach. Thankfully we didn’t spend too much time in the sea, and the captain turned the boat back into the fjord where it was more protected and calm.
Mitch and I went up to the captain’s deck to chat with him for a while as he said he has an open deck policy and we were happy to visit any time. He was from Wanaka and had been sailing in the Milford Sound and Doubtful Sound for many years. He claimed to know nothing of the recent grounding of the same vessel we were aboard that ran aground a few weeks prior near Crooked Arm. Perhaps he was not happy to chat about it as it could be bad luck to discuss those things while sailing.
An hour later the bell rang and we were eating again, a pre-dinner snack of homemade cheese scones. Feeling more settled, I couldn’t resist, but stopped at one.
While we were enjoying the scones, one of the passengers spotted dolphins so we grabbed our binoculars and witnessed a pod of very large Bottlenose dolphins known to reside in the Sound. Our nature guide told us that these dolphins are one of the world’s largest dolphin species, reaching almost 12 ft in length and weighing as much as a medium-sized horse. He explained that because these dolphins live so far south, to survive in the colder waters, they need to bulk up.
With the good weather and hardly any wind, we got the green light for water activities in Bradshaw Sound. We chose a ride in the tender boat over kayaking, opting for the more relaxing excursion.
We were rewarded with beautiful views and even saw a blue penguin swimming alongside the boat. We also witnessed hundreds more sandflies. Mitch was wearing his bathing suit and got eaten alive. He was seeing first hand what I’ve been going through since we arrived in NZ.
Back on the ship, it was time to eat again. We went to the saloon for dinner service, which was an impressive buffet spread of salads, sides, fish, mussels and meats.
After dinner, on the upper deck, the clear skies afforded us an amazing, memorable star gazing opportunity.
We retired to our cabin and slept peacefully in sheltered Precipice Cove, where the captain dropped anchor for the night, nary a wave or rough sea disturbing my sleep. In fact, it was one of the best sleeps of the entire trip so far.
