Feb 13th; Shakira and Sheep

Log

Date: feb 13th

Weather: sunny

Swell: small SE

Wind: light SE

Distance: 13knms

Camp: Stephenson's island

Blog

Shakira and sheep

We left early from our lovely camp beneath the Pohutukawa trees. We ate a great backcountry breakfast, rolled our boats down the pebble beach and pushed out into a calm bay. Rounding the headland we again got into awesome rock cliffs with there messy swells below sloshing and surging over the rocks.

Eventually we reached a head land and decided to paddle out to Stephenson’s island to take a short cut and perhaps find an early camp, as Dave’s wrist where playing up and starting to go numb. On arrival at the beautiful island we meet some friendly folks on their sail boat Leona. Ross and Ngaire Duncan where from Napier and spending a two month break on their boat while Ross had two months of work from flying helicopters in Indonesia. We had a good chat about the trip and where gifted some fresh plums, the Leona and her crew promised to keep an eye out for us as they began to travel south again soon.

Paddling on we came across another bay with a shearing shed on it for sheep. Dave proclaimed “I see a dancing girl in a thong!”

“What?”.. You must be hallucinating!!” I exclaimed back. Though sure enough there on the side of the shearing shed was a huge poster of what appeared to be a naked woman in a thong! When we pulled up on the beach to make camp, it turned out to be the singer Shakira, and was a big concert advert that the shearers must have put up on the shed for a laugh.

We made a nice camp next to the shed ( a good piece of kiwi culture there) and amongst the sheep poop, and hid from the heat of the afternoon below our shade tarp. Man it was sweltering. We climbed the steep hill to our backs and it was nauseating being so high, after seeing everything at sea level for so long. We had a spectacular sunset and then hit the hay.