Huge fish and Forty Meter Waves in New Zealand
Trip Start
Jun 07, 2008
1
153
188
Trip End
Jun 28, 2009
Te Anau,
South Island,
New Zealand
Monday, March 9, 2009
Then we went fishing. Mom caught the biggest fish today - a giant blue cod with scary teeth. Chris said that he could bite your fingers off if he bit them. Then I caught a big blue cod as well and Dad caught a scarlet bass. The water is really deep - about 50 meters - so you have to drop your line deep and I mean deep!
We were quite surprised when we saw some deer and even more surprised when Chris pulled out his shotgun and tried to shoot one for dinner
Giant lobsters for liunch
! We all kind of hoped he missed, and he did, so the deer were safe and ran away. Lu did not like this at all and kept asking him not to kill the deer. But he said they are feral and a danger to the environment here because they are not indigenous (New Zealand did not have any mammals until settlers arrived from Europe.) and he has to shoot them. Kind of crazy.Since we were in Charles Sound, we had to go out into the Tasman Sea again to get back to Doubtful Sound. We are in the Roaring 40's, which is the latitude and means the waves come all the way up from Antarctica. The waves were especially big today - four meters high. I did not feel sick today, but Lu was a little scared. The boat rocked and we could see the huge swells coming right at us. The water splashed all the way over the boat sometimes, but we were fine. Finally we got back to Doubtful Sound and it was totally calm again.
We motored down to a beach and went for a walk around an island. We met some men who were staying on the island to fish - they were not happy to hear we had caught more fish than they had. It was nice to be on land for a while.
Tonight we docked in a small cove and fished some more before dinner, then it really, really started to rain so we had a cozy dinner inside and went to bed as the thunder roared.
