by Bruce Ansley
The boat took shape at a Kaikorai Valley engineering works. It was built of steel. I quit my job and became a labourer. I did the awful jobs, like cleaning off rust and painting the inside of fuel and water tanks. I was and still am claustrophobic.
I was beaten up by a fat bully of a welder and saved by a skinny Australian with a ball hammer. I used up all my money and bludged a bed and food from friends who never blinked once. I wondered whether this was such a good idea, not for the last time.
When you’re young you’re not unattached for all that long. I met Sally. She took the long view. I might be filthy and broke, and my immediate job prospects were bizarre, and I proposed to go away for quite a long time, but heck, you couldn’t have everything. We didn’t know each other very well, and to her it was an act of faith for which I’ve been forever grateful.
Surprisingly, to me, one day the boat was finished, painted orange (Ian said it was a great colour if you were going to be rescued), christened the Nina (Ian said short names were easier to spell) and launched. In a very short time we were heading for Fiordland. We were elated. We were going to make our fortunes on the high seas.
We were stuck in Bluff for a week or so by bad weather, which down there meant the kind of weather which in other places would bring on a Civil Defence emergency.
One night, when it seemed a little less stormy, we set off, dodging Dog Island in the dark and heading into Foveaux Strait. We were wrong. It was not less stormy. The further west we went, the worse it got. Great lines of white-capped waves marched upon us. I inspected them closely, from the inside. I rolled around like a marble in a tin can.
We sought refuge in Port Craig, cut into the western edge of Te Waewae Bay and once a small logging town of bushmen, outlaws and their families, all of them evidently hardy. The sea was smoother in there, but that made the whitecaps prowling outside more fierce. A couple of other boats huddled with us. They said the weather would only get worse and we should give it a go.
We steamed along the south coast and the waves got bigger and they crashed on black rocks and their spray was hurled into the air and the coastline was horrifying and I understood the true meaning of the word ‘godforsaken’.
Suddenly the seas parted. Moses must have felt the same way. We sailed into tranquillity.
Above us a white lighthouse looked down kindly. We had rounded Puysegur Point and sailed into Rakituma, Preservation Inlet. I knew exactly why it had been so named. This had been a haven for centuries. We anchored alongside other fishing boats in a place called Otago Retreat on the chart but known to fishermen as Shallow Passage.
It goes without saying that we didn’t make any money. Oh yes, we caught crayfish, packed their tails into twenty-two-kilogram bags and stacked them in the boat’s freezer, and on stormy days we explored the long reaches of this amazing sound, and I fell in love with it forever, the sweet smell, the dark heavy air, the pale gold beaches above the black water, the piles of pale green kina shell lying like jewels.
We were always within sight of Puysegur Point. Across the narrow passage from the Point lay Coal Island. One of the lighthouse keepers, Philip Payn, discovered coal and gold here in the late nineteenth century and a town, tiny and remote even by the standards of the day, sprang up on the island. At the peak of the gold rush, around 1890, more than seventy miners, some with families, lived here, and remnants of that enterprise could still be found everywhere.
Once we were almost wrecked on the outside coast of Coal Island, and I gave thanks for the orange paint. Not for the last time.
The Puysegur Point lighthouse lay up a short steep track from the Passage. It had a weird reputation which seemed to fit perfectly. In 1943, a man lived on Coal Island among the ruins from that old community. He objected to the light on Puysegur Point across the water on the grounds that it kept him awake at night. Three lighthouse keepers and their families lived there then. He took them hostage at gunpoint and burned the wooden lighthouse to the ground.
Now the light sat on a concrete tower and the keepers had gone, but you could see where they’d been. I sat beside the tower in the wind looking over the Tasman and thinking about the remarkable people who liked this life.
Much later I met one of them, Warren Russell, who had lived there with his wife. He’d get out of bed every two or three hours to do a weather report. He didn’t just like the life, he loved it. He finished his lighthouse keeper career on Dog Island outside Bluff Harbour where the gales sometimes whipped spray right over the tower. Keepers were a select company, gone now.
I was keen to go too. Living on a small boat can get tedious, and tetchy. Also, I was in love, to be married that very March, and I can report that Preservation Inlet in the wildest, loneliest, most inaccessible part of New Zealand is no place for the lovelorn.
February dragged by on leaden feet, and March sprang upon us on sprightly ones, and I was increasingly alarmed. We were ready to go, waiting in Shallow Passage with a bunch of other boats, and after months of solitude every one of us wanted desperately to be gone. But oh, the weather. It was awful. It was beating the average by a serious margin on the Beaufort scale.
Communications were terrible. There was no way I could tell my intended of my situation. We had known each other for only a few months and I could hear the words ‘I told you so’ gusting over the mountains from her nearest and dearest.
One day the wind eased. The assembled fleet popped from its prison. We rounded Puysegur Point as an armada and zipped along Foveaux Strait with a great swell behind us. The boats were surfing down the waves and how exhiliarating it was. Bow waves sprang into the air for joy, exhausts let loose with a cheer.
Nina had been racing along for an hour when we noticed something odd. As the boat reached the bottom of the wave which was carrying it along, it would tilt to one side and turn. The helmsman would swing the wheel the opposite way and the boat would correct itself and steam on.
For a while, we took no notice. The price of crayfish, the long showers we were going to have, the warm beds of home. But the problem (for by now we realised we had one) got worse, until the man at the wheel was bracing himself as the boat sped down the face of each wave and did its best to turn at the bottom.
This is known as broaching: at its worst the boat could turn side on to the wave and be capsized by it. By now we had a pronounced list to one side. Something had to be done.
With my commanding experience of one season’s fishing, I thought I knew the cause. The bags of frozen crayfish in the refrigerated hold must have shifted, weighing down one side of the boat. Ho, yes. Without telling Ian, I went out of the wheelhouse, lifted first the heavy steel hatch-cover, then the foam-filled plug that stopped the cold air escaping, and wedged them against the surrounding crayfish pots stacked on the deck.
Dropping into the hold, I looked around.
The bags of crayfish, frosty white, were exactly as we’d stacked them. Odd, I thought. Still, while I was down here, I’d move some bags to the high side of the hold which might correct the list. First one, then two, then half a dozen, cripes, it was cold down here, and kind of spooky, and . . . clang!
A particularly nasty roll shook the hatch-cover loose. It swung free and, in that particular way in which these disasters gain momentum, collected the big square plug on its way, wedged it into the hatch opening, and fell on top of it to make sure of the job.
It happened with the speed of a gunshot. One moment I was down below doing good deeds, the next I was captive in the dark, with all the machinery of the boat performing as designed, and freezing me solid in as short a time as possible.
I considered my position. That is, I thought rationally for a fraction of a second before my claustrophobia set in, followed closely by panic.
I beat the plug with my fists. I lay on my back and kicked it. I cursed it so fervently any decent object would have shrivelled, but that damn plug took absolutely no notice. I knew how the crayfish felt. One moment they were in their natural environm
ent, happily going about their business, the next they were frozen stiff with no prospects at all.
I don’t know how long I was down there. It can’t have been very long, for a fishing boat is not very big and Ian was bound to notice my absence.
He did. He came out on deck, looked around, and shouted, ‘Bruce!’
‘I’m down here,’ I shouted back. My cry sneaked past the bung and the hatch-cover and squeaked into the open air.
‘Where?’
‘DOWN HERE!’
I heard the hatch cover being yanked open. An eye appeared beside the plug. ‘Wha—?’
He pulled. I pushed. The plug did not move. It had been hammered by the hatch-cover and it liked its new possie. It wasn’t going anywhere.
‘Doesn’t matter,’ Ian shouted. ‘The boat’s going to sink anyway.’ He grabbed a screwdriver, jammed it through the crack into the hold, and went back to saving the ship. I hoped. I was not at all reassured by his closing sentence. Sinking was one thing, bad enough for sailors to avoid if they possibly could. Sinking while trapped in a freezer . . . Well, even as avid a storyteller as I was probably wasn’t going to get around to telling that one.
I grabbed the screwdriver and attacked the plug in a frenzy. It didn’t move. A tiny bit of reason appeared, no more than a glint in the dark. Where was the plug stuck? Over there in the corner? What if I got the screwdriver in here, levered it just so?
Whap! The plug popped free and I popped out in the same split second.
Never had the crowded deck of a small fishing boat in the middle of one of the world’s most feared straits felt so good. Oh, yes. Nothing could be that awful, could it? Capsizing? Poof.
Ian did not agree. Upside down was not good. He wanted to avoid it. He waited for the right moment and with considerable skill managed to turn the boat around. A nearby vessel which knew we were in trouble and was standing by turned around to escort us back.
Now that it was not surfing, but going into the waves, the Nina was steadier. Both boats turned for Puysegur Point. The white stump of the lighthouse appeared. None of us had expected to see it again for a while and certainly not so soon.
It was the very definition of mixed feelings. On one hand, we were safe. On the other, we were safe in a place far from the home we’d been looking forward to.
We rounded the Point and dropped anchor in the calm below. Our immediate problem was quickly fixed: a fault had pumped fuel from one tank to another on the opposite side of the boat, weighing down that side. But our escape had used up the one day of calm weather we could reasonably expect in a fortnight or so. The gale returned. We were stuck.
The crew of the other boat took it calmly, considering that they’d been looking forward to going home too, resuming family life, living the way normal people do. But all things happened at sea.
I was not calm at all. The prospect of missing my own wedding, without explanation, seemed so awful that sinking into the depths while locked in a freezer seemed a promising way out.
We spent another ten days stuck behind Puysegur Point. At last, the weather stilled. We raced around the Point in the dark, set a course for home, and never stopped before we tied up in Careys Bay, Port Chalmers.
I spruced up. I’d towed my jeans behind the boat for a hundred kilometres and reckoned them ship-shape.
Good fortune set in. I did not know where my wife-to-be, Sally, was living, but I marched hopefully up Princes Street, Dunedin. The very first person I met was her sister Donna. She told me Sally’s new address and, what was more, did not look the least bit surprised that I’d appeared out of the blue two days before the wedding. Oh, all right, Sally did look surprised when she opened the door and before her stood a man with a ginger beard wrapped around a sunburned, flaking face, dressed in clothes that looked as if they’d been dragged behind a boat for a hundred kilometres. Even after I identified myself she seemed a little . . . unsettled.
Well, to cut a long story down a little, we got married, I made no money from my fishing adventure, and the boat sank. A long marriage ensued, and continues, although marriage is always a wild journey itself. Given its delicate balance, however, perhaps that’s a story for another day or, safer still, another life.
Strangely, I still longed for Puysegur Point. The mysterious twists of Preservation Inlet, its still green water, its bays, intricacies and complete strangeness had been preserved in my memory amid the slow crumbling of age, a period of my life so full of adventure I sometimes think I must have been down there for years.
When the chance came to go back, I seized it. My transport was the good ship Argus, piloted by Colin (Wobbles) Gavan.
We steamed up from an anchorage on Big South Cape Island, Taukihepa, passing the jelly-mould shape of Solander Island, once home to five men, two parties of sealers first marooned then abandoned by their captains.
They were rescued in 1813 by the ship Perseverance, whose captain concluded they could only have survived on that lonely rock for four years or so by ‘divine interposition’. Ingenuity may have played a greater role:
They were cloathed in seal skins, of which their bedding also was composed, and their food had been entirely made up from the flesh of the seal, a few fish occasionally caught, and a few sea birds that now and then frequent the island [. . .] They had attempted to raise cabbage and potatoes, of which plants one of them happened to have some of the seed when unhappily driven upon the island; but their first and every subsequent experiment failed, owing to the spray of the sea in gales of wind washing over the whole island, which rendered culture of any kind impracticable.
This was no place to linger, although our destination seemed hardly better: mountains grim in the fading light, waves crashing white on the Marshall Rocks beneath the Puysegur Point light. The Argus rolled in the big swell, pitching into it and taking it on its shoulder, passengers bracing themselves against furniture and doorways.
The captain believed that a golden lode ran between Coal Island and its immediate neighbour, Steep-to Island. It seemed likely to stay there for a while, Preservation Inlet now being part of the Te Wahipounamu–South West New Zealand World Heritage area, and listed as the Rakituma/Preservation Inlet Historic Area by Heritage New Zealand to boot. Digging for gold was frowned upon.
Captain Cook’s voyage cleared the way to exploiting this new land. The usual crowd of chancers was on his heels, hoping to strike it rich.
A memorial, a small plaque, was set in Cuttle Cove where a whaling station flourished in the early nineteenth century. Sixty men worked there in what was then Southland’s biggest town. Until the 1830s they killed right whales and seals. The seals were all but wiped out. The whales survived, barely, but the Cuttle Cove settlement did not.
Gold miners followed.
In October 1908 the Clutha Leader reported: ‘The Tarawera Company claims to have proved by extensive and careful prospecting that their property contains vast bodies of very rich ore. Old miners consider there is sufficient to last the company fifty years.’
Miners drove shafts through solid rock, hallways and caverns. The lust for gold, for treasure in a new land, must have driven these men hard. They carved their way through rock with basic food and little comfort in the windiest, wettest, wildest, loneliest land any storyteller in their northern homelands could ever have created. Was it poverty that drove them, or imagined riches? Either way, it was a monkish life, without the enlightenment. The rich seams promised by the Tarawera Company’s ‘careful prospecting’ were as ephemeral as the old miners’ stories. The gold simply wasn’t there.
A much more modern settlement scarcely fared better. The whalers, sealers and miners had left behind them pockets of freehold land, extremely rare in this southern fastness. A syndicate built a lodge on one of them near Cuttle Cove, and called it Kisbee Lodge. Surely tourists would snap up the opportunity to stay in the nation’s most remote wilderness, admire the primeval forest, live in a New Zealand that once was and never would be again, walk soundlessl
y on the soft carpet of moss and lichens, and eat lots and lots of fresh fish?
Alas, tourists did what tourists do and went to Bali. When we were there the lodge was owned, it was said, by an Auckland syndicate which used it more or less as a bach. A rather baronial one.
Colin Gavan told the story of an old gold miner here who hid his stash in a gumboot, buried the gumboot under a tree, and marked the tree with an iron spike. Then he sailed away to find a doctor, for he was ill — very ill, as it proved, because he died. Alas, the forest in that spot was felled. No one ever found the gold, but the spike turned up: it stripped the teeth from a saw in the timber mill.
More interesting were the cave networks where Maori once lived. They were subdivided by stone walls, marking off living and sleeping areas. Middens, heaps of shells, often stood outside their entrances, for they always had an escape route and somewhere to land a waka.
We spent a night moored next to the iron hull of the Stella, the steamship that brought supplies to these lonely communities, now another fascinating wreck. Then we rounded Puysegur Point with the lighthouse sentinel above and went home in a flat calm, with that sneaking sense of relief. Adventures are fun, as long as you emerge from them intact.
5
Rolling on One
State Highway One carries New Zealanders from the top of their country to the bottom. It is as adventurous as the Great Ocean Road in Australia, as exotic as America’s Route 66, as scenic as Norway’s Atlantic Road, which is sometimes called the most beautiful journey in the world, but only by people who don’t know about SH One. It is our Appian Way, although a bit longer and a whole lot more bendy.
It joins all the dots, the cities and the small towns. It is vital to the nation’s health and well-being, like an artery. When something blocks it, the country clutches its breast and falls to its knees.
