36º12S / 175º20E Early yesterday afternoon, at low tide, Rebecca and I went exploring. We zipped around the bay in the dinghy, waded on the mud flats digging bivalves out of their holes, and followed a freshwater creek through the woods – climbing over fallen trees and plowing through masses of ferns. After an hour we came back out of the woods to our beached dinghy and found a Kiwi yacht had anchored in our beautiful, isolated bay. They weren’t too close and it was time we started meeting the locals, but we had enjoyed having the place to ourselves for a couple of days. We picked up Karen and the three of us motored over to say hello. Turns out they were from the marina we stayed in last year, and were berthed next to our good friends on Cherokee Rose. When we left for Fiji last year, Cherokee Rose had stayed behind in NZ to do work on their boat. We had talked to them on the SSB and expected them to anchor next to us before evening. Looked like the party was getting bigger.
A little later in the day, the couple invited us over for “sundowners before tea”. (Translation: Sun Downers, noun, usually plural, yachters around the world recognize this as “bring your own drinks, we’ll supply snacks, enjoy the conversation as the sun goes down. Tea, noun, NZ, and Aus, what we would call supper or dinner – if you are invited for tea, don’t eat before you go). Another Kiwi boat had anchored nearby so seven (later nine when Cherokee Rose arrived) crowded around the cockpit. Kiwi yachters know about seafood! Rather than the typical snacks of peanuts, pretzels, olives, and cheese, or cut veggies, Myra and Bevin served steamed mussels and lightly breaded pieces of snapper. Around mouthfuls, we asked them to teach us how to collect and cook our own.
There are large, floating rafts of mussel farms all around the Great Barrier Island but we hadn’t found any mussels or oysters clinging to rocks at low tide. Turns out the farmers are perfectly happy for you to pick mussels off the buoys that support the dangling lines where the actual crop grows. They mechanically harvest the mussels on the down lines but it’s too much trouble to gather the wild ones that grow on the buoys. So, help yourself, limit 50 a day, don’t touch the down lines, please. There are mussel farms all over the Great Barrier Island, with several hundred buoys supporting each farm, one buoy has enough mussels to fill a large bucket so we find ourselves surrounded by thousands of mussels free for the taking. Our new Kiwi friends were also kind enough to point out a cove across the bay where they had been collecting scallops in 50 feet of water. The water is cold but, with a sea bed littered with scallops, I’ll certainly be diving. As long as I’m getting wet, there are plenty of lobsters living around 50-60 feet along the vertical walls of the islands. Then there are the ten-pound Snappers that bite when the current is running. What a Paradise!
