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Published: October 30th 2008
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It was a very cold and early start but when the bus picked us up we seemed to have a good group, there were six of us divers and two instructors. The journey as I mentioned was amazing, although we did sleep the first bit, it was so warm and snuggly in the van... woke up feeling very sick as we twisted and turned our way at high speed (these guys drive it every day!) up through the mountains. But anyway, we were soon down the other side and off to Milford Sound.
The Sound was so calm and so beautiful in the morning, it was only 8.30 or so when we arrived and so we had beaten the hoards of tourists who arrive at lunchtime on a bus. We packed the tiny dive boat with our air tanks and kit and set off over the Sound. We were very quickly aware that it was going to be rather a different diving experience to our tropical dips of Australia! The water was really, really, really, really, really icy. In fact it was this that made it such an interesting dive. The top 3 metres or so of water is icy
fresh glacier water, having run straight off the glaciers and down into the sound (ouch). Below that is the sea water (salt water being heavier than fresh water - remember your physics lessons?) which is slightly warmer - about 8 degrees... bit of shock to the system after 25 degrees or so in Australia! Anyway, the really interesting thing about diving this is where the fresh water and the salt water mix, you get an oily looking patch, so for a meter or so going down it is really oily and you have no visibility at all - very strange but I loved it, so different. The top water is obviously much colder so they try to get everyone down as soon as possible. I cannot stress how cold it was, and it gave our systems a real shock. I found it so hard to breathe going down the first time as I was gasping for air - like when you get into a freezing cold shower. Once down there, it was really pretty cool. It is like deep water diving as it is quite dark (there are tannins in the top layer which block out lots of the light)
so not only is it rather eery, but it means you get fishlife and corals growing there that you would only normally get at 100m plus. Really amazing - black coral which bizarrely is actually white - growing in abundance. It looked exactly like the tacky white xmas trees that you get sprouting up all over the place. We saw loads of cool fish - mainly wrasse (actually can't remember any of the names of the other ones). It was a good dive although it was a bit scary, it took me a while to get used to it.
We came up and warmed up (just about) before going down for another dive. This time we were much more comfortable with the water temperature and the experience under the water but unfortunately Rich had a tank of bad air and we had to come up after about 20 minutes. It made him feel quite 'crook' for a bit - sick and headaches and stuff, and he had been coughing all through the dive - it's just as well we came up early. Anyway, he recovered OK enough for a beer at lunch so no permanent damage done 😊 and
Waterfalls
(I've forgotten the name of them!) it taught us an important lesson to smell/taste our air before diving.
Our teeny boat visited the seals (by now we are a bit yeah-whatever about seals!) and the amazing tumbling waterfalls. The boat stuck its nose (bow I believe the tech term is) under one of them and it came thundering down on us! We also pulled up at a little rock pool and still with our warm wetsuits on we stood underneath one of the ice cold waterfalls. Really cool! Also saw another penguin and a pod of dolphins playing around the boat.
We had lunch and filled in our log books - there was a nutter there on a motorized skateboard that was quite fascinating. Rich took a wicked picture of him which the restaurant asked for a copy of to put on their walls - his first piece for his portfolio...
Back to Te Anau that evening and back to Redcliff - the food was too good to resist. And so cheap!
More on the next one - we are doing a huge catch up today as you can probably tell, as we have been so busy we haven't had time to
blog for ages - the next few days are going to be madness as we try and cram all the things we want to do in NZ into a couple of days before we're off to Fiji (oh, it's such a hard, hard life!!!).
MWAH!
C&R xxxx
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