Day 49
Today we had to get up "stupid early" (per our bus driver) to catch our ferry over to Stewart Island. It was Good Friday and lots of people were heading over to Stewart Island for the long Easter Weekend. So, unfortunately the 11:30 and 9:30 ferrys were full and we had to take the 8:00 am ferry over. That meant that we had to be on the bus by 6:15 am to drive down to Bluff and catch our boat over to the third largest island of New Zealand. We watched the end of The Worlds Fastest Indian (a great movie about a guy from Invercargill, NZ and a motorcycle) on the way to the ferry terminal. We boarded the ferry and had a rough 55 minute ride over to Stewart Island. The Foveaux Strait is known as a pretty rough section of sea.
We arrived, got checked into our hostel, went to find some accomodation for Sunday night (it was a very busy weekend so our hostel and a few others were all booked up for Sunday night), and had a cup of coffee at the little cafe on the warf. We did find a room at the historic South Sea Hotel for Sunday night. We didn't want to do to much, because we were waiting to see if our afternoon activity was going to happen.
We found out about 11:30 that we were on for our afternoon fishing trip. We went out on Lo Loma to catch some blue cod.
There were a few other guys on the trip from New Zealand and the Cook Islands. We motored our from the harbour and stopped near some outer small islands. We put down our hand lines and started pulling in the blue cod. It was super fun and new way of fishing for both Andrea and me. Below is a look at some of our bait at the end of our fishing line.
We fished for about 2.5 hours drifting and then motoring to a new spot to drift and fish again.
One of the other guys even caught a small reef shark
The fishing was great and the scenery was even better.
We saw a bunch of Buller's Albatross (they liked try and steal our fish).
The captain cleaned the fish on the back of the boat, so they got plenty of guts and heads.
We also saw a rare Royal Albatross
We were out on the water for about 3 hours and caught enough blue cod for a few meals of fish and chips. John was the gold medal winner as he caught the biggest blue cod of the day! The blue cod was some awesome tasting fish! Right up there with fresh walleye.
After our incredible dinner of fish and chips we crashed due to our early morning and hard core fishing! A very fun first day on Stewart Island.
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