The Beautiful Bay of Islands

Today we headed down to the pier for 8:45am to do a four hour tour of some of the Bay of Island's 144 islands (counted by Captain James Cook, of which only 88 are officially classified as islands; the others are just rocks).

We first stopped in Russel, a town on the mainland on the other side of the bay to pick up some more passengers and then we were on our way.

The first main island we saw was Motuarohia, or Robertson Island, where in 1769 James Cook anchored the Endeavour and went ashore. His party become involved in a dispute with the local Maori tribe and a musket was fired, resulting in the death of the Maori chief. Caption Cook stayed on this island ten days before leaving.

We also sailed to the Cape Brett peninsula and saw the lighthouse. Next to Cape Brett peninsula is Piercy Island. Piercy Island is renowned as The Hole in the Rock, for an obvious reason. The hole is 16m wide and goes through the island and out the other side. We sailed through the hole much to everybodies delight, before heading back towards an island we had passed earlier.

At around 11:15 we had a 45 minute stop on the largest island in the bay, Urupukapuka Island. The waters surrounding the island were really clear; we saw two sting rays just swimming about. We got off the boat and had a paddle. We saw some tiny hermit crabs and some tiny tiny almost clear fish type animals. We got back on the boat around 12.

The name of the boat was the dolphin seeker. We hadn't seen any dolphins and the skipper told us they weren't allowed to look for dolphins between 11:30 and 1pm, and as it was 12pm, we just has to head back to Russel. We were quite disappointed  however luck was in our favour. As we headed back we sailed directly into the path of a pod of dolphins. They were pretty big ones and came so close to the boat. We got a fab view of them. And as we sailed away we could see them jumping out of the water behind us. It was so  awesome!

When we reached Russel, Lauren and I got off to have a look round, as the tour included a ferry ticket back to Paihia. There wasn't much in Russel but we sat and had a drink before getting the ferry back around 2. It only tool about ten minutes. We spent the rest of the afternoon sitting on the grass in front of the sea.

The Bay of Islands is absolutely beautiful. We sailed past so much stunning coastline and I have so many pictures that just do not do any justice to the place. The landscape is just amazing.