//This post refers to events from February 2015 when we were land traveling in New Zealand, having left SV Estrellita in a keel pit in Fiji. I had originally written this for a non-blogging purpose, never did anything with it, and so am posting it here.//

More than 150 pilot whales were stranded on the beach and the call was going out for volunteers. Like many cruisers, we were using the South Pacific cyclone season as a chance to tramp and car camp around New Zealand. While the pilot whales were struggling on the hard, we were snug in our sleeping bags at a hippy rock climbers campground at the North end of the South Island of New Zealand, about 45 minutes away.

After an unusually noisy early morning in camp, we unzipped our tent to find the climbers campground was deserted -- an incredibly rare event at that hour. After asking around we found out about the stranding which had occurred the previous evening. When we arrived at the beach, we were happy to see a large crowd of volunteers.

Believing that there was no need for additional help, we went to the beach just to observe. Several tide cycles after the stranding, there were still about 60 whales on the beach and quite a few were already dead. A baby whale and its mother were still alive. The mother was struggling under her own beached weight while the baby was splashing in a trench dug around its body.

We came upon a team of people caring for a whale they had named Emily. The volunteers were cold, wet, exhausted and in need of relief. They gave us instructions on how to care for Emily and we spent the next several hours carrying buckets of cold water to cool her overheated core, keeping her upright on her belly to avoid crushing her pectoral fins, and talking to her to calm her breathing and to keep her from panicking.

Emily was severely blistered from the sun. She kept her eyes tightly shut against the drying air and blew fiercely in intervals out of her blowhole. One of her pectoral fins had lost a deep slice of skin from her struggles before she was rolled onto her stomach by volunteers. She had been draped in an old white sheet to protect her skin from further sun damage and to hold the cooling water against her.

I will never forget my turn at her head, crouched down in the wet sand at her side near her eye, talking soothingly to her. She had rolled slightly and we were trying to right her. We had sandbags to keep her propped up and in good position for the upcoming high tide but sometimes the sand would give, or she would struggle and start sliding to one side. While we were righting her, trying our best to avoid her badly blistered skin, her breathing had become more jerky, with the breaths coming closer and closer together. You could feel her pain and fear. As I began talking soothingly to her, she gradually slowed her breathing and began taking full, even breaths. I had calmed her and that realization connected me to her in a way that I will remember forever.

As the tide approached, surging in quickly on the long flat beach, the volunteers without wetsuits scurried back across the muddy tidal flats to higher ground. At this point, the difficult task of keeping the whales calm and in place until they had enough water to swim safely began. The Department of Conservation used special floats to first bring out a whale that they believed was a pod leader in hopes that the lead pilot whale swimming offshore would encourage the others.

New Zealand's Golden Bay has a long history of whale beachings. Although scientists are still uncertain as to the exact cause, the preferred explanation is that the long sloping beach combined with a large tidal range confuses the echolocation of the whales who cannot get a solid radar return on the low angle slope. The pilot whales come in, the ebbing tide rushes out and they become stranded. With up to 8 kilometers of tidal flats at Farewell Spit, even if stranded whales refloat on the next high tide, the long shallow beach causes the whales to have difficulty finding their way to deeper water and they often find themselves stranded again.

At sunset, when all of the surviving whales were floating just off the sand, the wetsuit volunteers grasped each others' cold, salty hands and formed a human chain to direct the whales away from the shallows and into deeper water.

Emily swam away. The Department of Conservation experts assured us that whales can recover from such grievous injuries to their skin. I hope so. The next time we are on passage in the South Pacific, sailing between island nations, and we are surrounded by pilot whales, as has occurred several times in the past, I am going to toast Emily and hope she and the rest of her pod always stay in deep water.

It was daylight and I was on watch. We were about 300nm off the E Coast of Australia near the Lord Howe Seamount Chain. Our tow gen, which is normally suspended by ropes from our stern pulpit, banged into the stern pulpit. This sometimes happens in big following seas when the tow gen propeller surfs a wave and slackens the line. When it happens, we jam ropes or other soft things between it and the stern pulpit to prevent damage. This time I sat staring at the stern pulpit for a second because the seas weren’t that big. The tow gen banged again against the pulpit. I thought maybe something was fouling the propeller and looked behind the boat toward the prop.

I saw a huge dorsal fin surface, moving sideways to our path. As it crossed where the tow gen prop was trailing, the back of the shark also rose out of the water for a second. I caught only a glimpse of it and I am terrible at estimating size and distance but I can tell you that I have never been in the water with a shark that big.

I squealed. Carol raced up from down below. And we watched the shark, now under water, pacing the tow gen prop, then falling further back but still visible in the waves pacing our boat. I took some video but of course the camera was downstairs initially and so it was too late when we brought it up (the story of cruising and wildlife usually). There is a grainy moment in the video where Carol and I see the shark with our eyes, but this screen shot (below) just shows something darkish in a wavelet.

When we pulled the propeller upon landfall in Coffs harbour several days later, it had candy stripe strips of paint removed from its shaft as if something hard/sharp had been pressed against it while it was spinning. Was it the shark’s skin when it bumped it? Did it actually bite it? We have no idea. There was also a gouge out of the propeller blade.

We had heard that sharks hit tow propellers but we had never spoken to anyone who had actually had it happen. I can state for the official record that they DO!

One of the delights of sailing in Vava’u Tonga this time of year is that we have
seen whales about half of the time we are out sailing. Sometimes far away, sometimes close, sometimes just a few blows on the horizon, once a whale that came nearly alongside, very often breaching, tail flukes arching and fins slapping.

We run around exclaiming, trying not to run into any reefs, fall overboard or jibe/tack while we ogle the whales.
Mostly we just enjoy them with our own eyes, rather than staring at a camera screen, but one time I took a moment to grab the long lens camera and snapped a couple of shots.

We’ve had a lot of whale encounters in Canada, near California and off the tip of the Baja peninsula but never so regularly as we have had here.

The whales have come to Tonga to have babies and make babies at this time of year and so they are everywhere.

What a dual personality Niue showed us. I’ll start with the negative. After a 10 day passage including passing through a front at the end, we were exhausted. We made landfall at 3am in the open roadstead ocean anchorage that is Niue, took a mooring and sat down with a small taste of cognac preparing for a hot shower and some sleep.



But no, oh no, that was not to be. The swell was too far South and was wrapping heavily into the harbor. The harbor was well protected from the wind, calm and quiet, and it was protected from the direct swell (so safe) but the wrapping swell had us rolling from toerail to toerail. Carol and I can sleep well in all kinds of conditions in the boat on passage and both of us could not sleep, even exhausted, in these conditions. The second night, the same thing. I told Carol that if the swell wasn’t down on the third night I was sleeping in the rental car because I was desperate, after two weeks, for a night of rest. Thankfully the direction change enough SE for the next week that we were only lightly rolling. Things ranged from comfortable to bearable for the rest of our stay.



And of course, the discomfort was totally worth it. We had whales in the mooring field for most of the second half of our stay. Swimming between the boats, spraying into the air, tale flukes gracefully curving out of the water, side fins slapping, the sound of their song through our hull.



Then there were the sea snakes. We did one dive exploring the canyons in the mooring field and staring transfixed at the individual sea snakes as they lazily swam back and forth between the surface and the reef.



And then there was the trekking, the swimming associated with the trekking, the bouldering, the views.



And last but not least, we met up with old friends, with new friends and we met new people in Niue. A great small community of 5-6 boats playing in parallel. We left Carol’s moldy hat (a microbrewery in WA State, anyone recognize it?) and picked up a new Niue Yacht Club hat for him.



A short 10 day stay, but a wonderful set of memories collected.