The last post

Six months have whirled past in a blur for us and now we find ourselves back at our home in Little River as though we had never even been to Raoul Island. It's an odd feeling.

Suddenly we have had to come to terms with traffic that moves at more than 30km/hr. Supermarket queues are a nightmare. The ads on TV make us cringe. But, also, there is colour everywhere - we have returned to the bloom of late spring after our eyes had become used to the uniform greenery of the island. Our dawn chorus comprises the lilting chime of bellbirds when two weeks ago we would awake to the grating squawks of adolescent pukekos completing their every-30-second reporting in duties to their parents.

And it's wonderful to be reacqainted with friends and family, a process that will continue for some time yet.

Our trip home began in the most promising fashion. Smooth seas, sunshine and a farewell guard made up of humpbacks. Alas, it could not last and soon the mighty Braveheart was plunging its bow over a three metre swell, cascading spray up over the wheelhouse. This was the same bow where, down below the waterline, Gaye had jammed herself into her bunk and prayed for the anti nausea drugs to start working. Soon.

I can report that the behind-the-ear patch worked an absolute treat and I was able to eat all the meals (plus a few snacks), watch a video tracing the early career of Bob Marley, absorb another rather breathless DVD on surfing at Tahiti's Teahupoo, read two books and pace about endlessly on the deck. That was when I wasn't checking that Gaye needed another clean bucket, of course.

So if you saw one of our earliest posts, I guess you'll recognize a cruel sort of symmetry here.

Anyway, at some stage over the busy next few weeks I'll write up a last-last post with a brief linked overview of our time on this lovely island. We have been asked a few times "Would you go back?" and people seem surprised to hear a response in the negative. This does not mean we haven't had the time of our lives; it's more an acknowledgement that it's not always a worthwhile thing to try to recapture experiences like the one we've had.

Speaking of recapturing experiences, I spent many happy hours assembling images and video footage onto a DVD, copies of which went to all our fellow residents. This proved to be something of a mixed blessing. In order to make the space on my laptop necessary to complete this task, I foolishly moved ALL of my 4500 digital photos onto an external hard drive.

It promptly crashed - yay, Western Digital! But at least the DVD survives.

If you have arrived here long after the last post was posted and you have a question you wish to ask, just write it down as a comment with your email address in it and one of us will reply. Your address will not be sold off to an entrepreneurial Nigerian businessmen, I promise, and it will not appear on the blog - all comments come first to our email address and we decide whether or not they go any further.

So the last post ends with a video clip of the trip from Raoul back to Tauranga. It's been a heap of fun writing this blog and we've kept track of our readers with great fascination - all 5,414 of you as at 10pm today.

See ya!

Down deep at the Chanters

We are off on Monday morning.

Yesterday the RV Braveheart boys agreed to take Bas and I for a dive. We have had no scuba gear for the duration of our stay here, and despite me greasing up to various visiting yachts, no opportunity to get underwater has arisen to date.

We were taken to the Chanter islands and it was a truly spectacular dive. The descent was down some vertical walls to about 120 feet; we saw lovely soft corals and some weird and wonderful fish that aren't quite so accessible when you're snorkelling. Boar fish spring to mind - they're like huge Angel Fish with pouty bee-sting lips. Strangely, the terrain reminded me of paragliding at Treble Cone in Wanaka, such was the sense of vertigo you get with sheer drops above and below you. The visibility was excellent and can apparently be something of a hazard there - the water is so clear, you don't realise you're going too deep.

I finally got to swim with some of the Galapagos sharks, who shadowed us for the latter part of the dive and swam in close underneath me at one stage. They are beautiful, graceful creatures - very sleek and streamlined.

As Bas said with his inimitable turn of phrase, "This was the cream on the cake for the last six months."

A visitor to Met

Gareth found this little fellow in the Meteorological buildings and fed him one of Gaye's biscuits.

We're outta here (soon)

The last week has seen us all trotting around giving our island a good spring clean. Before it becomes someone else's island.

This has involved a major cleanup of the hostel and grounds, a mammoth session cutting virtually every blade of grass with mowers or scrub-bar (or a knife on the concrete edgings, as Bas discovered). The tracks are all spruced up and the roads ready to go. Raoul looks extremely presentable.

The RV Braveheart has sailed from Tauranga and is plugging through northerly seas towards us. The quality of their voyage should improve dramatically as they near the island, as the sea here is  completely transparent and looks like a mirror. Even the whales are enjoying it.

Gaye and I have moved out of our room and we are now living in the tent, close to the sea, but well above the high water mark in case of further tsunamis. Tomorrow the population of the island will almost triple as the newbies settle in, the ship's crew comes ashore and various DOC and changeover experts arrive to facilitate the handover process (we won't be back on the mainland for another week, but already I'm writing in bureaucratic-speak).

 The tent is tucked in at the end of the hostel lawn

We have had a wonderful time but we are looking forward to getting home.

But nothing ventured....

All photos: Gareth Rapley

There are also days when everything works out just fine!

Sometimes you have to learn the hard way

Every now and then I look down at our beach from the flagpole at the top of the cliff and think "that surf is just too good to miss." This is despite the fact that the tide is wrong, the beach is steep and littered with boulders and even though I know I can get into the waves OK in my little red kayak, getting out of the water again will be a whole new problem.

Gareth was on hand to record this very ungraceful exit from the sea. You can see I have already abandoned the boat - it's disappearing up the beach out of the frame, and all that remains is getting out without too many bruises.

Photos: Gareth Rapley

The annual whale survey

This was yesterday's little task. It involved seven of us dispersing to various viewing points around the island, then sitting down with pen and paper to count those whales. The results are still to be collated (my job) as a number of observers opted to stay out for the weekend, but it was a pretty busy sea!

 Hutchie's Bluff - a good place to view the whales

My spot was Hutchie's Bluff, on the western tip of the island. I had 34 sightings in the course of the four-hour survey, eight of which were two whales moving together. Some of the others saw pods of eight whales.

One of the memorable moments for me was seeing a cloud layer peel away after about three hours, and then noticing the water erupt with breaching whales as the sun struck it behind the receding cloud shadow. It was as though they were celebrating the arrival of sunshine, and it was truly joyous. Tail thwacking and leaping out to see who could make the biggest splash were the order of the day.

Postscript: 21 October (please do not read this if you are Russian or Japanese)

The report has been compiled and sent off. Our total was 117 whales for seven observers over four hours, but we are almost certain to have recorded some of the same whales at different sites. Nevertheless, it's an impressive total, especially as on our circumnavigation a few days earlier we only saw 11.

We continue to be amazed at some of the antics the whales display. Two evenings ago, we had two large whales perform a series of perfectly synchronised jumps in front of the hostel, like ballet dancers on steroids. I even managed to get some of it on video.