11.06.11 Whale of a day

Whale Island in the background (Where the movie Whale Rider was filmed)

2 of the whales (Humpback whales)
Our golden weather continues, the forecast for the weekend is for northerlies dying out and calm sunny days. Saturday morning we out to BS1A our spot 30km out to sea for a Hapuka (groper) drift in 200 metres of water. The sea was a bit lumpy with a 10 Knot northerly we spent about 3 hours trying for a Hapuka at various rocks we know in the area with little success, I did manage to boat a 10kg yellow tail Kingfish which is good eating. We headed out to the 350 metre mark for a look and managed to have a hook bitten off by a shark, we headed into Penguin reef about 10 km's inshore of us to find after 5 km the sea just flattened out and there was no wind at all, perfect, we did a couple of slow drifts in 50 metres of water to find a lot of small picker fish but nothing big enough to catch, the water was clean and blue unusual for this time of year and with a lot of rat kingfish under the boat we got the jigs out for a bit of practice. After half an hour we got bored and headed into Kells for a Tarakihi fish for the table. The wind had gotten up again inshore but we were able to find a school of fish and put a dozen in the bin. While we were fishing we saw a very large mass of dolphins heading towards us there must have been hundreds of them heading out to sea, about 2 km away they turned and start to hi-tail it back towards shore, we then noticed a couple of large splashes behind them and saw a couple of killer whales (Orcas) herding them by doing large breach's behind them (we suspect the rest of the pod of killer whales were lying in wait for the dolphins in the shallows). Cool I've never seen an Orca before. We pulled the pick and headed home, about 5 k's from the ramp Murray saw a couple of water spouts and then we saw a whales tail as one dived, we thought the Orcas must have moved up here but these turned out to be real whales (Humpback whales) 3 of them surfaced near the boat and were heading up the coast, probably the ones we saw a few months back. Amazing to see 2 groups of different whales on the same day.

After talking to the Dept of Conservation it seems that the whales were Humpback not Southern Right.

04.06.11 Queens Birthday Weekend

Ancient old Pohutukawa tree

Looking up the road to Cape Runaway

Across the road from the Bach on Sunday

The Bach at Waihou Bay

Back after Saturdays fish

Queens birthday weekend is our last long weekend before summer, so Johnstone, Ethan, Evan and myself booked the Bach at Waihou Bay again. Hopefully the weather would be a lot kinder this year than last year, but the forecast wasn't that good. We headed up after work on Friday night in 2 4x4's with 2 small boats. The 4 hour drive was longer than usual due to the road conditions, since we were up the coast for our cricket trip in the end of May, there has been several large rain storms that has dealt to the roads with slips and washouts everywhere.
Saturday morning reveals a light to moderate northeasterly so we head to our cricket rock which is sheltered from the easterlies. We get the berlie out and are soon molested by Kahawai, it is real hard to get a large stray line bait to the bottom for the snapper to have ago at. When a bait does get to the bottom the snapper drag us into the weed or over a ledge and we do our best to keep the fishing shops in business for another year by losing trace after trace, but over the day we manage to catch 9 nice snapper and one small but legal Kingfish. As the day gets on the wind picks up and at times we have to hang on to the rocks in the gusts, so by 3pm we call it a day and head back to the beach, only to find the swell has picked up from flat to over a metre, it took some good seamanship to get the boats in safely.
Sunday turned out to be the same as last year - heavy rain, big swells and strong winds, so it ended up a day of cards and emptying the chilly bin.
One of these days our luck will change and we will get, great weather and even better fishing.