Today was the much anticipated trip on the Pelorus Sound Mail Boat, so we were up early and down at the quay by 8.40. By 9.30 we were on our way, with a full boat of tourists and several mail bags and boxes. The day was overcast to start with, and the sun shone through in beams. It quickly warmed up though, and sun cream became the order of the day.
First up was the mussel farms scattered throughout the area. The Marlborough Sounds grow 70% of the mussels produced in NZ, and the Pelorus Sound industry is worth over 200 million dollars a year. This was a mussel harvesting boat. The mussels are 'seeded' onto rope which hangs below the large floats you can see. They take 15 to 18 months to grow to harvestable size, and are then stripped off the ropes by boats like this. Each white bag of mussels on the boat weighs a ton.
The Pelorus Mail boat has been delivering the mail in the area since 1918, but has always had to take sightseers along to provide sufficent finances. On this run we had six places to deliver mail to, and it took us over 90 minutes to reach our first port of call.
Along the way we were delighted to come across a group of about 10 Little Blue penguins swimming in the sound.
At our second stop we were met up a very excited dog, we realised why when the first act of delivering the mail was to give him a dog biscuit. All along the route our skipper, Jim, gave us a running commentary about the families living at each location, bits and pieces of history about previous inhabitants, plus informative chats about the timber and mussel industries.
At our third port of call another dog was waiting for us, followed down the wharf a moment later by a large pig who also got a dog biscuit!
An extra thrill on the trip was coming across a pod of 30 to 40 bottle nose dolphins who played in our bow wave and gave acrobatic performances. Though it is apparently quite common to see dolphins in the sound it is rare to come across a pod this large.
Our last call was on an 88 year old man, and his chicken. No dog biscuits this time, but the chicken did get the crumbs out of the onboard biscuit tin. The gentleman here lives on his own, creates his own electricity from a 30 metre waterfall on his property, and sails into Picton once a month to visit his wife who has had to go into care.
We saw Australasian gannets, cormorants (shags), gulls, ducks and then more dolphins on our return to port.
They leaped and cavorted again, and this time I even managed to take a short video of them. And guess who got to steer the boat for some of the way back.
We had been slightly disappointed with the mussels we had eaten last night, but decided to give them another go at a different restaurant tonight. Much better, more flavour and less chewy. They are certainly more substantial then the small blue mussels we are used to, a small dish of them makes a complete meal!
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