Bonfire on the beach
Rachael, a cleaner at the Dusky Lodge had her last day in Kaikoura on Thursday. The weather was beautiful so we went down to the beach near South Bay and had a swim, then a BBQ by the pool at Dusky and later in the evening a bonfire on the beach.
Saturday morning I started work at the Pot Belly Bakery in town. Pretty easy work, just washing dishes, wiping tables, sweeping up etc at the moment and I’ll probably gradually get trained on other things. Only four hours on Saturdays and Sundays but it means a bit of extra money coming in which I can hopefully save whilst I’m not paying for my accommodation. Saturday evening was the last night for Saana and one of the volunteers, Gemma, so we had a BBQ up at the volunteer house with lots of food including freshly caught fish courtesy of Manuel, the other PhD student.
Humpback whale and dusky dolphins
Had a strange start to Sunday morning, being woken by a phone call from Manuel telling me there was a tsunami coming (as a result of the Chile earthquake) and just to let me know he had been evacuated from the field station… a little hard to comprehend first thing in the morning after a late night! Anyway, the tsunami didn’t amount to much although no boats went out for the rest of the day. I went to work at the bakery again and afterwards met a couple of friends and headed out to the aero club to see if we could get a flight with Adam, one of the pilots who had offered to take us up for a seriously discounted price. We went up around 2.30pm and the weather was beautiful. We quickly found lots of dusky dolphins and a humpback whale which is the first one I’ve ever seen! We then headed around 18 miles offshore to find sperm whales. We spotted to quite close together at the surface and Adam did some figure eights between them so we could get a good look from both sides of the plane. It was very cool to see them from the air, a different perspective from the boat, and it allows you to see the whole body and get a much better impression of the size of them. We turned back to land after about a half hour flight and on the way Adam did a few sharp banks and, after announcing ‘hold on to your cameras’, a zero g drop which was great fun!
Sperm whale
That’s about it for now, into March already… how time flies!
