(written on the 10th from notes!)
Wow! What a day! I think I walked/ran for a total of somewhere around 13-15 miles today. 😶
And it was mostly because of the whales! 🤯
But I’ll get to that soon. 🙃
I woke up at my little overgrown grass road that’s far more vegetation than road. The only thing that shows that it’s a road is the width (almost wide enough for one car) and the tracks that basically look like people like me have been driving down it every once in a great while, so the grass weeds that are growing are mashed down to the ground where the tires go.
I left the spot relatively quickly and headed back toward Te Waikoropupu Springs again.
There were a handful of cars when I arrived this morning, and after using the bathroom, which I was quite grateful for, I walked the shorter part of the loop back to the springs, snapped a handful of pictures, and then just sat my butt down on the little boardwalk outcropping viewpoint enjoying the springs.
As I was sitting there, I recognized one of the people walking up, the gentleman I had a long conversation with at Rawhiti Cave the other day. 😊
We chatted again for a bit, during which time, among other things, he recommended I do a walk that was just down the road from where we were–the Pupu Hydro Walkway.
And I’m grateful for that suggestion because it led to a potentially once-in-a-lifetime experience for me, an incredible bitter-sweet experience (much more sweet than bitter), that actually made international news.
As I was just getting to the summit portion of the hydro walk track, I came across a Swedish couple. As is my general custom, I often make conversation, and as we were talking (I think about where they had been today?), they mentioned that they had been up near farewell spit. While there, they found out that there had been a mass whale beaching the day before, and some of the same whales that had beached yesterday, re-beached today, and they were looking for volunteers with buckets and wet suits to help save the stranded whales.
So I ran the rest of the way up to the summit and then down the longer side of the track back to the car park which included beautiful little spots, like this trailside canal, a bit of a steep drop on the railing side. 🙃
Once down, I quickly hopped in my van and booked it to Farewell Spit, rain starting to fall as I got closer (which I guessed was probably a boon to the rescue efforts).
I had no idea if they still needed help or not, but when I got there, there was a lady guiding parking who asked if I was there to help, and I said yes, and she didn’t say that they didn’t need help anymore. She just told me to put on my wet suit, make sure I got some sunscreen on, and then head down the beach.
So I did, at first accidentally putting my wet suit on backwards. 🙃 Once remedied, with my bag packed, I headed down the beach, quite a long walk from where the car park is.
Along the walk, sadly, I passed one dead whale. 😞 It looked like there might have been some sort of predatory fish around it, as it looked to me like a couple creatures were excitedly swimming just below the surface–sort of like the feeding frenzy scenes you see in nature shows.
I don’t know if that’s what it was, but that’s what it looks like to me. Later, when the tide was going back out, that whale had some bloody cuts on it that none of the other dead whales had, but no chunks taken out, so I don’t know.
I arrived just in time for the heavy lifting/dragging of the whales (Pilot whales ranging in size from maybe 10 feet to maybe 20?) from where they were beached out to deeper water, so I dropped my bag in the tall dune grass at the edge of the beach, headed to the water, and joined a group of people who were using whale-rescue slings to 3, 2, 1 lift! the whale, foot by foot out to deeper water.
We lifted and struggled and pulled and pushed, and worked to keep her upright. Regularly, we adjusted the slings (in the process of pulling forward, the slings get wedged into the poor whales armpits/finpits) over and over again). Each pull was awkward, as each volunteer has to be close enough to the whale for the lifting to do any good, but your struggling to avoid stepping on the poor whale’s fins as it’s dragged forward.
Eventually, each lift progressed from maybe one to three feet per lift (I think maybe we had 8 people on ours ?) to where we had enough buoyancy to make it maybe 20 or 30 feet at a time before giving her a rest.
This might be a good time to explain the mechanics of the beach and why so many whales were stranded and dying.
The ocean floor in this particular bay is extremely shallow, and the slope to deeper water is incredibly slight.
At high tide, the beach on farewell spit is probably about 30 feet wide, for much, if not most of its maybe 20-mile length. But when the tide goes out?
😶
In chatting with one of the regulars there, the tide goes out at walking pace, and by the time you hit low tide, the beach has gone from being 30 feet wide to being five to 10 kilometers wide.
Which is why you get this:
😲
And this 😞
Sadly, it’s the perfect whale trap that results in mass beachings nearly every year. 😞 One of the guys there told me that some years ago a pod of 800 wales had 300 get beached.
Yesterday, it was 55, and today 15 of those original 55 whales had re-beached. One of those 15 was number 19 from yesterday (they’re numbered with paint of some kind, so it was clear, when they re-beached that it was 15 of the same whales from yesterday). Number 19 was our whale, a medium-sized one.
Eventually, we managed to get all of the whales out to deep enough water for them to be able to float and swim, but it’s… not as easy as that.
The whales are quite disoriented, and it takes them a very long time to get their bearings, some quicker than others.
And forgive me if you know all of this already. 🙃
Once out in water that was about waste to chest level, All the volunteers formed a human chain to keep the whales from going back toward shore. It doesn’t really take much effort because the whales are mostly so disoriented that they’re lying on their sides, fun up in the air.
As a newbie to whales and the rescue experience, it’s disconcerting to see the whales on their sides with their blow holes underwater looking quite distressed.
The more seasoned whale rescue volunteers assured us that that was normal.
To me, it looked like what happens when fish have a swim bladder that goes haywire, and they can’t tell which way is up.
We spent the next probably two to three hours mostly in the human chain formation acting as a barrier to the whales.
The sun came out, and the wind was blowing northeast something fierce (diagonally toward the spit). The strong winds kicked up the waves a good little bit, such that the shorter members of the volunteer group were sometimes up to their chest or deeper in the water).
Periodically, volunteers would need to go to shore because they were getting too cold, so our ranks diminished a little bit over time.
As the whales were beginning to regain their bearings, they just hung around each other instead of trying to go out to sea, which was a little bit of a problem because we had by that point already passed high tide, and so the tide was beginning to go back out.
A handful of us broke from the human chain and joined the staff members in taking a few of the whales and pointing them toward the deeper water, pushing and pulling and doing whatever we could to keep them from going back to the other members of their pod.
But they wanted nothing of it. We tried and tried, but these huge creatures eventually would just will their way back around to the rest of the members of their pod. I happened to be working with the one who apparently was the most stubborn, and I think just about bit me a couple times. 🙃
At least I think I was aware of and felt an open mouth coming toward me as it tried to spin around to get back to its pod mates.
Anyway, the hope in pulling a few out to sea was to have the others follow, especially if we could identify which of the pod numbers was the leader, but our first efforts in that attempt to failed miserably. 🙃
So those of us who had tried to get the whales further out to sea rejoined the human chain, and we just drifted with the whales trying to keep them from getting closer to shore.
I think the entire time that I was there, and probably before I ever arrived, there was a documentary film team on location filming everything that was going on. One guy carrying a boom everywhere, and another guy carrying a massive camera strapped to a contraption on his back. There were also drones overhead for most of the time we were out there, I think.
After probably 3 hours total of being there, the whales mostly having gotten their bearings but still being unwilling to leave for deeper water, a few of us again joined the staff with the same effort of pushing them out to sea, this time more of them.
Again we pulled and pushed and heads up their way trying to force them to go out to sea, and finally, it worked. Either we got the leader in one of those efforts, or we simply dragged enough of them far enough away from the others that the ones that were still by the human chain started to follow. 🥳
Once the whales had gotten to a bit deeper water, we all reformed the crescent-moon-shaped chain and just and watched and drifted and watched and drifted for a good long time until the directors of the effort were satisfied that the human chain was no longer needed.
The vast majority of the volunteers headed to shore and back to the car park while perhaps 15 or so staff members and experienced Project Noah members stayed out for water maybe another 30 minutes just to be sure.
Wow! What an experience!
I’m glad I didn’t pay for a whale watching tour. 🙃
The wind was still absolutely howling, so loudly that I could barely hear the gentlemen next to me as we loudly talk to each other trudging through the powerful wind driven waves on the way back to shore.
On the shore, the wind was blowing against us as we walked back maybe a couple of miles to the car park, the blowing sand giving a free facial scrub. 🙃
Having been out in the water long past the life of the sunscreen that I had put on, and being in the water, I was concerned about having been badly burnt. Add to that the wind burn, and the sand all over me that, when mixed with sunscreen, felt like it was rubbing against very sensitive skin, made it seem pretty likely that I might be in for a long night of really hot face from a sunburn. And I far away from town without aloe vera gel. 😅
I snapped a handful of pictures, sadly only if the dead whales because I didn’t think to put my phone in my waterproof case and tuck it inside my wet suit while I was out working.
On the walk back, I found a massive whale vertebrae (about the size of a large cantaloupe, maybe a bit bigger).
Once back to my phone, I also realized I had several messages from a family members and friends, so I texted back and forth with my mom and sister Heather a bit, chatting about what I had just been involved in.
Because of how strong the wind was, and also because walking back toward the car park was walking toward the sun, I spent a good portion of the walk back walking backwards. 🙃
Finally back at the end of the beach next to the car park, I was graded by some of the official staff who thanked me for my efforts and gave me a cheese sandwich triangle. I was also told that I needed to leave the vertebrae on the beach as this was a protected area, and nothing is allowed to be removed.
I got myself changed, took a look at my step counter for the day, realizing of course, that hours worth of being in the ocean wandering all around wasn’t getting counted.
Despite being as tired as I was, I was close to Cape Farewell, so I figured I’d swing by and revisit that place, just a handful of kilometers away from the whale adventure.
So I headed over to the car park and made the short walk up to the cliff’s edge.
The sun was quite low in the sky by this point, depending on where I was standing, it was hidden behind the large hill on the west side of the viewing deck.
It’s a beautiful place. Beautiful view. Perhaps similar to the famous ocean cliffs in Ireland?
I snapped some pictures and generally just relaxed and enjoyed my time there, sitting for a bit on the grass by the cliff’s edge just taking it all in.
Despite being extremely low on gas, I found that I was also quite close to Wharariki Beach, which was pretty much the last place in that particular geographic area of New Zealand that I was interested in going to before heading back down toward Tākaka.
Not wanting to drive all the way back as the only vista interest in that area left to me, and being right close to sunset, I thought it might be fun to go and do that last walk of the day down to the beach for sunset.
Again, it was only a handful of kilometers away from where I was, further from gas, but still a very short distance, so I headed over and made the walk, maybe a kilometer or two down to the beach.
Down to the beach I met a young man named Nick from Denmark, and we hit it off pretty quickly, chatting for probably 30 minutes while at the beach, snapping pictures, chatting all the way on the walk back, and then chatting for a good little while once back to the car park.
Good stuff.
My gas gauge was on empty for much of the drive back, but I wasn’t able to get gas at night anyway, as I can only buy gas at the places that have people at the counter.
So I drove back to a little bush road from last night, parked for the night, veged out a little bit, and crashed.
Never imagined I’d spend five nights in the area of
Tākaka. 🙃
Lift the world.
Bring it on.
~ stephen
Lift the World 