I had THE BEST WEEKEND EVER!
Martin and I drove down to Whakatane (about four hours southeast of Auckland) on Friday night, and we all slept on the boat, Ma Cherie. We woke up Saturday morning at about seven, ready to head out. It takes about 3 hours to make the trip, as White Island is about 30 nautical miles offshore and the boat is from the 1960’s.
I should have known from the start it was going to be an amazing trip, as we saw a couple of hundred dolphins on the trip out. Cameron also reeled in a kingfish, which is a highly prized white meat fish that is wonderful to eat.
We got out to the site, geared up, and jumped in to see pink mao mao, tons of starfish, blue and red moki… Some of the best dives I’ve done in New Zealand! We did two more dives on Saturday, and saw beautiful urchins (look for the one with a red sort of body in the pictures), starfish I’ve never seen before (like the black and the white ones), tons of nudibranches… absolutely amazing! We even did a night dive, where I borrowed a torch from Ali and Cameron to use. It was really neat because you could see sulfur bubbling up from the sand, and the sulfur comes up and turns the undersides and some of the tops completely white (look for the picture of this as well). During the night dive I also got to see a conger eel, but he was too fast to take a photo of!
Dylan, the crew on the boat, cut himself while he was filleting a fish the day before, and Saturday night he got a big red line going up his arm, so the Whakatane Coast Guard came out and brought him to the hospital to have them look at it (looked like tetanus or blood poisoning) but he ended up being okay and came out Sunday morning on a day trip boat.
For dinner Saturday we had raw kingfish with wasabi and soy sauce, kingfish on the grill, and kingfish with tomato on pieces of bread, after the fish had been cooked in onions and butter and garlic, soy sauce, salt, pepper, and a touch of cream. It was truly one of the best ways I’ve ever eaten fish! I really like kingfish so it was a real treat to have some fresh seafood!
Sunday we got to dive a reef that comes up to about 18 feet below the surface, up from about 200 feet, as sort of a sunken-island. There were tons and tons of fish, and I had quite a bit of fun poking around in cracks and crevices looking at brittle stars (the starfish in the pictures with really long maroon colored arms). They move quite a bit once you put a flash on them. We also got to dive an area with a neat swim-through, and a large channel between two rocks. I ended up playing with a grey moray eel as he was swimming through the weeds. Sadly, on this dive I put the batteries in my flash backwards so I couldn’t take any pictures.
We were also diving the Volkner Rocks, which was a marine protected area that covers a couple of pinnacle rocks that come up, just to the northwest (I think) of White Island.
Today was my favorite part of the trip. We got to go onto White Island this morning, which is New Zealand’s most active marine volcano. It was SO COOL! We had to wear hard hats and breathe through wet t-shirts because really strong, acidic gasses flow out of the vents on the volcano. We saw the superhot vents, the huge crater lake (which was too steamy to even try to take a picture of) and boiling mud pools. SO cool!
Then we dove a reef, where there were tons of schools of fish, and we saw two stingrays, one of which we got to come up off of the sand. It was a picture-perfect dive. After that, we pulled up near a rocky part of the island and spotted maybe about twenty or so seals on the rocks. While we were doing our surface interval, Martin went onshore to try to get the seals to come into the water and go for a swim, while I waited in the water with my snorkel stuff on. About four of them jumped in!! It was SO SO SO SO cool to swim with them! I took a video and as many pictures as I could. Then, it was time for a dive, so we quick put on our stuff and jumped back in, only to find that a few of the seals were still in the water! What a treat that was to take pictures from below, with the sun’s rays shining into the water around the seals. What an amazing last dive of an incredible trip!
I’ve also included a picture of a horse skull that we found underwater on the last dive, not sure how that got there… There’s also a picture of a yellow shell with a purple and white frilly looking thing coming out of it, that’s an unidentified snail type thing that I need to figure out what it is. There’s also a picture of a gem nudibranch, which is purple and blue with brown wart-shaped growths on it, those are wicked cool, I didn’t see one of those until the last dive, where there were lots of them! Also, there’s a picture of us on the island in a concrete building- that’s a sulfur mine on White Island, well- it used to be. A couple of guys were working out there and vanished one day, and the mine got destroyed from the sediment shifting around.
All in all- phenomenal trip, phenomenal weather, phenomenal diving!
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