With a goal of seeing some sperm whales, we headed to Kaikoura. Only just reopened after the 2016 earthquake, the whale watching tours had been operating out of Christchurch. The continental shelf is only a few miles offshore from Kaikoura, where the ocean floor plunges abruptly to over 3600ft of depth. A combination of cool Antarctic and warm tropical currents make this a very fertile and productive ocean region. This draws large amounts of wildlife, including dolphins, whales, seals, and seabirds.
The sperm whales spend most of their time (around 75% of it) swimming and hunting in the total darkness of the deep ocean. With a recorded dive time of over 2 hours, they will often only spend 15-30 minutes on the surface before diving again to hunt.
Sadly, our first tour was not successful, all the whales were far off shore, and not within range of our 3-hour tour (the boats are fast). In exchange, we got plenty of vomit. The swell was up, and the crew had used all the available time looking for whales, so we had to take the shortest, fastest, and roughest route back. I stopped counting after the 15th passenger filled a motion-sickness bag. Mostly because I had to duck down and make a deposit of my own. The vessel we were on was a shallow-draft catamaran with about 2,000hp. It basically just surfed the swell, which didn’t help. Here are a few photos of other marine life we got to see on the trip (not for long usually).
Having missed the whales, we were entitled to a 80% refund or a rebooking. We opted to rebook (with a 20% discount after the 80% refund) for the next day. Sadly the next day was also a failure. Thankfully, this time it was not as rough, and we took some travel sickness medication beforehand. Much less vomit all around.
So we had the option of a 80% refund (off the 20% discounted second fare) or a rebook. So we rebooked for two weeks out, and planned on changing it when we heard the whale and weather forecasts.
We headed south to Christchurch to get some supplies, and do some kayaking in the various bays on Banks Peninsula.
We saw a Hector's Dolphin (the smallest species, endemic to NZ only). Sadly no pictures.
From there we headed inland through Lewis Pass. We stopped over at a DOC campground there. Before the day finished, we walked to Lake Daniells. It was nice to have a track mostly to ourselves. Only a few locals were present.
The valley bottom follows the alpine fault line, a curious concrete wall had been built right across the center.
Back before GPS, this wall was an experiment to see the the fault moved slowly, or in sudden jumps. In the decades since, the fault has not moved at all! About 10 years before this wall was built, the fault shifted a meter vertically, and several meters horizontally during an earthquake. You can see the slight incline in this photo.
During the 2014 earthquake, the fault line running along the Kaikoura coast shifted violently. In less than a minute, the seabed rose between 2 and 4 meters. The old shoreline is easily visible as we walked the coast. The Kaikoura marina was left too shallow to use, and large rock outcrops are now exposed to the air. They don’t call NZ "the shaky isles" without due cause!
We continued onwards to Lake Daniells. This feature, called the Sluice Box, is a 20ft wide, and 20ft deep channel flowing between two walls of harder rock. With a smooth, flat bottom, only the ripples give away the rushing torrent (over 20mph). Not a good place to swim!
Like many predator-controlled areas in NZ, there are stoat/ferret/weasel traps scattered about the tracks. Having been in place for several years, most are rarely called to action. This one had just recently caught a stoat! About the size of a ferret, and native to Europe, these skilled hunters take down rabbits often weighing over 10 times their body weight. For that reason they were introduced in NZ to control rabbits, which were introduced because settlers were stupid, I mean, homesick. Of course, stoats much prefer the birds, eggs, and chicks of NZ's native birds. Having evolved for millions of years with no mammalian predators, they were easy pickings!
I wonder if there is a kiwi hiding in there?
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