Doubtful Sound

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Wednesday March 11, 2009

And now for something completely different…Doubtful Sound.

When I was planning my itinerary I debated whether to see Milford or Doubtful Sound. I settled on both. It is getting cooler here. All the peaks in the area have shown additional accumulations of snow in the past three days. I actually used the little space heater provided with the van this AM. Driving to Manapouri this morning on the doubtfulsoundcruise.com bus I see my first deer farm. This “cruise” is different from Milford in several respects. First we (limited to 20) are shuttled across Lake Manapouri by Capt. Mike in a launch just big enough for us to fit The location where we land on the other side is the site of the largest hydroelectric plant in NZ. I won’t go into all the details except to mention that it is privately owned and most of the power generated by it goes to a large aluminum smelter on the southern tip of the South Island. It was built in the last 30 years and the fact is the infrastructure (i.e. road) that goes from the plant site to Doubtful Sound is what opened the Sound to large-scale tourism. For the better part of the 20th century visitors to the sound by land made a 2-day (one each way) trek by horse and buggy. Anyway, back to Capt. Mike. I had not read the fine print and did not realize that this was a BYOL (bring your own lunch) deal and further I didn’t realize the personalized nature of the tour until we got to the power plant. Mike drops us off at the visitor’s center and says “I’ll be back with the bus in 15 minutes. He is and the 20 of us load into the bus and proceed to get our tour of the power plant. (o.k., at this point the only people reading are Ernie and Norm so I will not go into the details of the plant except to say that the plant was operating at about ¾ capacity today and was cranking out 526 megawatts.) See photo. Into the bus and over the hill. Great drive. The first sighting of Doubtful Sound is nothing short of awesome. Mike says we are fortunate because most days our viewpoint is shrouded in clouds. On down to the sound and once again Capt. Mike parks the bus, jumps into a rubber dingy and motors out to our tour boat, which is moored in the harbour. The boat is a 50-60ft cruiser that is designed for touring. From here you can just look at the pictures except I can’t leave out the hi-light of the trip. After cruising around the Sound for well over an hour Mike says we are going out into the Tasman Sea and that swells are a rather calm 5 meters. About 10 minutes into this part of the cruise it is pretty much white knuckles. I’m on the aft deck and people are hanging on for their lives and I won’t mention the language used by most. We head out to some rocks and as we arrive he explains that this is a small seal colony(see photo). We get within 100 ft of the rocks and waves are crashing over the boat. Get my money’s worth, you better believe it!! We cruise back to the shelter of some small islands, stop, turn off the engines and listen to the birds. The cruise continued for about another hour. As I write this I keep thinking that the wind is blowing the camper around but then realize I’m still feeling the effects of being on the water. Thank you Gilligan. We were on the sound about 3 hours. MASSIVE!

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Photos

Doubtful Sound
This is the first view - usually too cloudy

Hydro Plant
Ernie - O.K. how many Megawatts per turbine?

Doubtful 2
typical view

Tasman Sea
the perfect storm, hey mate

Seal Colony
do you see them?

Tasman 2
On the aft deck. Yes I am looking out at the top of a wave at eye level.