//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.

While we were traveling by plane to Tonga and New Zealand we drew on the liquid motivation a number of readers have passed our way.

First, a BIG thank you to Toledo Clayworks who bought us a round of Maka beers while we were in Tonga *and* a round of Moa in New Zealand.  The Maka beers were frosty, local and hit the spot, but of course did not compare to the tasty microbrews we found in New Zealand.

Our second BIG thank you goes to our friends, Jamie and Tyler. Thinking back to our time with you guys over dinners at your table, we thought a large slab of meat and a round of microbrews were an appropriate remembrance of times past.

Here we are with two enormous piles of ribs and two Crafty Trouts which weren’t as good as Laughing Lab but brought back memories of Bristols. Love you guys!

Our third BIG thank you goes to our friends Dave and Allison who funded a Superbowl day of, um, “festivities” for us while we were traipsing about New Zealand – you know what we’re talking about. Still waiting to host you somewhere tropical you two!

Want to see what else we’ve used our liquid motivation for? Click here.

Every year hundreds of boats transit the South Pacific, leaving from ports in North or Central America, and arriving in tropical paradise. By the end of the cruising season, after visiting a handful of Pacific Island nations, each boat has to decide where to weather out the South Pacific cyclone season. By far, the most common strategy is to reach New Zealand in early November with plans to return to the tropics at the end of the cyclone season in April or May.

As we sit here swinging at anchor in Tonga, at the end of October, boats are in transit, already transited or waiting for weather to sail to New Zealand.

One reason New Zealand is the default option is because it is commonly considered to be outside of the cyclone belt...but is it?

Yes. By definition, a cyclone* ceases to be a cyclone the moment that it leaves the tropics. This exit is called an extratropical transition and the former cyclone is now called “a storm of tropical origin”. In addition to the fact that a cyclone has exited the tropical arena and reaches colder waters, it often (but not always) loses other physical characteristics such as the eye that are necessary to be considered a named cyclone.

No. Even though this storm of tropical origin is no longer accurately labeled a cyclone, mariners and news outlets usually continue to use the official cyclone name as a former cyclone approaches New Zealand because, semantics aside, the strength of the wind in the storm of tropical origin can be as extreme as any tropical based cyclone. Over a 27 year period (1970-1997), Northland averaged one storm of tropical origin, with cyclone strength winds, per year. In April 1968, Tropical Cyclone Gisele re-intensified near Wellington producing winds gusting to 145 knots and blowing the roofs off of houses as far south as Christchurch on South Island.  As recently as March 2014, Cyclone Lusi brought cyclone strength winds to North Island.



It Depends. These former cyclones, as they reach New Zealand, are usually rapidly weakening and for that reason don’t often reach very far down the North Island. While an average of one extratropical cyclone per year hit the area from Auckland north, the area south of there, between Auckland and the top of South Island averaged half as many. Still, extratropical storms of considerable strength, as described above, have reached all of the way down South Island.  Strangely enough, although El Nino is generally associated with increased cyclonic activity, the strongest extratropical storms affect New Zealand when the ENSO cycle is neutral, not El Nino.

In Sum. While the risk is still relatively low, New Zealand is not accurately described as being unaffected by cyclone strength storms of tropical origin. New Zealand has been directly hit by substantially more extratropical storms of cyclone strength than areas of French Polynesia (i.e., the Marquesas and Gambiers). It is more accurate to say that New Zealand is a low risk border region – albeit one with well protected harbors, stout marinas and facilities for repairing any damages.
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*In this region a cyclone, among other characteristics, starts as a 10 min sustained wind speed of over 34 knots. 10 min sustained wind speeds of over 64 knots (a hurricane in other regions) are a Category 3 cyclone.

References:

• Sinclair, M. (2002). How often is New Zealand hit by tropical storms? NIWA Water & Atmosphere, 10(1), 12-13.
• Thompson et al. (1992). Tropical Cyclones in the Southwest Pacific: November 1979 to May 1989. New Zealand Meteorological Service.