Sea Kayaking

We have completed our first family sea kayaking trip!  This was a first for all of us, our friend Yan had a few trips under his belt so he was designated trip leader.  
We put in at Carey's Bay in the Otago Harbour, about 10 minutes from our house.  

Once out of the Harbour and out in the open ocean we stopped at Aramoana Beach for lunch and a few pictures.

The cliffs were truly amazing.  John and Grace had a close encounter with a blue penguin swimming out in the ocean and a seal playing in the waves off one of the rocky beaches.  They were able to paddle right up next to him.  Pretty cool!!

My first attempt to surf a kayak was in the approach to Long Beach, which ended in my first swim in the Pacific Ocean... Above you see Yan graciously pumping the water out of my boat.  Surprisingly the water wasn't too cold, though once out on the beach in the wind for a bit I was reaching for dry clothes.  Grace was a bit cold as well so she put on John's black fleece... Which made her look like Quasimodo or Igor... I could not stop laughing at her.

In length the whole trip was around 16 kilometers and took us around 5 and a half hours to complete.  The takeout was in a tiny town called Waitati which is around a 45 minute drive to our front door.  Since we set shuttle before our trip we had both cars at the takeout and we were able to head home without delay.

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Exploring we will go...

One afternoon while John was at the office Grace and I decided to discover a "new" beach.  Long Beach is about 30 minutes from our front door, it seemed easy enough to find so we set out without a map, big mistake when I am behind the wheel.  After a few missed turns and a little drive out of the way we turned down the road we had been searching for and found ourselves at our destination.  By far this is my favorite beach, sloping shoreline, massive cliffs, huge caves and not a soul besides us to share it with.  Of course as soon as we stepped foot on the sand my camera battery died, so the pictures below are from the following day.  Grace and I enjoyed it so much that the very next day we went back and took John with us.

On this day Grace and I were better dressed to explore some of the caves, we had proper clothing and headlamps!! There are many, many caves along the shore some you'd want a harness and rope to get to, but most are down at ground level.  One in particular is HUGE, with several rooms off the main opening.  Grace and I strapped our head lamps on and began our exploration.  We began on our hand and knees and were quickly lowered to the army crawl, with Grace leading we made it pretty far back in the tunnel.  We decided to turn around when we encountered a small pool of water and a petrified pile of poop.... We found a spot to turn around and headed back.  After exiting this room we quickly went to the other tunnel we had in our minds to explore.  It was a shorter crawl into another smaller room, probably just big enough for me to sit up right.  Grace was again the lead explorer, she was crawling around the little room when I popped my head in just in time to hear her say "WOW! Look mommy! EGGS!!!!"  Hmmm, how do I feel about crawling into a deep, dark, damp hole where there is a nest of about 6-8 eggs.... Yeah, not great.  I took a look at the eggs, bigger than chicken eggs for sure, white or at least creamy in color, and they appeared to have been buried in the sand.  After a bit of online research, best we could figure was that it was a Penguin's nest. 

Fueled by the recent discoveries Grace was ready to crawl back into every other crevice we could find.  So we continued our walk along the beach but found no more tunnels quite at exciting as those.  I had packed us a picnic lunch, so once back in the warmth of the sun and out of the shadows of the cliffs we sat and enjoyed our sandwiches and apples.  

You can't see it in this picture, but in the grasses on the top of the cliffs were sheep grazing.  Some of them were quite close to the edge, like mountain goats.

The first of these two pictures are of Grace running to share with John the new of our great discovery... The Eggs.

The second is of Grace at the end of our adventure, covered in sand, dirt and god knows what else.

-At a later date, while running shuttle for our sea kayaking trip which you'll read about in a later post,  I was retelling this story to our friend Yan, who said that they were most likely Penguin eggs.  Although it is an odd time of year for any animal to have a nest of eggs, Penguins seemed like the most reasonable explanation.  

Easter eggs and giant boulders

Dragon eggs... hooligans gallstones... the bowling balls of the giants... dinosaur poop... Stonehenge of New Zealand... a.k.a. The Moeraki Boulders.   Perfectly round and scattered along the beaches are these impressive stones.  Their round shape was not formed in the same way other rocks are smoothed and rounded by the rough waters of a river or the ocean.  They are buried and only exposed as the beaches and land around them are eroded away.  They began forming some 60 million years ago on the ancient sea floor, made mostly of mud, silt and clay which are then cemented together by calcite.   The inner core of the stones is softer, as the calcite becomes more concentrated on the outer shell of the stones over time the stones begin to crack from the inside out.  Once these cracks were formed the soft inner core was hollowed out, as you can see these hollow rocks are big enough to fit a Gracie...

It was a beautiful day, the water was freezing as usual but that didn't stop us from wetting our toes. 

I thought it was kind of fitting, spending Easter Sunday learning about the boulders, they're like mother nature's hidden Easter eggs.