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Published: November 4th 2009
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This morning we were all set to go. I think I forgot to mention that Charmaine kindly made us sandwiches and we sorted out some little bits to eat for the whole day out at sea.
We set off at 9.30 and by about 10am we encountered something…An orca whale. Infact it was a whole group of them, there must have been 10+. Now the guy that was the captain had been doing it 26years and he said he had only ever seen something like this 3 or 4 times. INCREDIBLE! I found this thing on my camera which did quick bursts of lots of pictures so I was able to get some great photos and delete the rubbish ones of course. The whales came right up to the boat, literally feet away and were showing off. They kept blowing lots of water out and came both sides of the boat too. The photos which will 1million% be posted are brilliant. We didn’t realise that we were even going to see whales today so to our delight it was fantastic. The only problem with this though is that the dolphins are scared of whales so it wasn’t certain that we were
going to see any. We travelled round looking at all the rocks and how they were formed, which islands were private, which were inhabited, who invaded here and what year, and which birds were where, who killed which Maori tribe where, what beach did they do it..etc etc. You wouldn’t believe the information that the guide/ captain Billy knew and you wouldn’t believe the history of the islands. Did you know this is where Captain Cook first came…. Anyways the captain…He must have been late 40’s but knew so much. I later found out he was Dutch but he spoke like a New Zealander and so you would never have known. While I was out taking all the pictures Charmaine was inside the captains cabin writing down all the info. We stayed in the cabin the whole time and he was really good in telling us all sorts of information. On the map that we got given he showed us where we were going, where we have been, it wasn’t an easy route as we went everywhere in and out of little openings between the islands (bearing in mind this boat was massive, it seated about 120 maybe?) of which
some days you could not do because of the winds and tides. Today we went through every gap and we were like feet away from the rocks but he seemed to handle himself well and was very good at what he did!
Right at the top of bay of islands was this place called hole in the rock, suppose you can guess why…well basically its like a big archway which we went though and it was brilliant the way that it was formed and how it got to such a state…Many photos were taken there as it is a landmark.
We came to this part called Deep water cove where swimming with dolphins was prohibited as this was their resting grounds (as on our boat you were allowed to swim with them under certain conditions) We decided to have a look in there simple as he told us a story about the beach and before we knew it we were surrounded by around15-20 amazing dolphins with little baby dolphins too (swimming when they had babies was one of the conditions where you aren’t allowed) switching my camera to the quick shot setting I took lots and lots of photos, some
amazing photos of them jumping out the water and flapping their tails, it was incredible once more as we didn’t think that we were going to see them. I got some really good shots of them flipping In the air.
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betty walker
non-member comment
dolphins
sorry charmaine spelt name wrong ????? hey this is well u cant imagine dolphins and whales , they do captivate u and u just can watch for ages, caroline and i saw a dolphin in ireland and we were about an hour time seems to stand still, the photos are very good .xx