-
Campbell Island - Source: ONE News -
View Photos
-
Related
Tsehai Tiffin is on-board the Navy Frigate HMNZS Te Kaha with the Department of Conservation travelling to Campbell Island in the Sub-Antarctic, home to some of the world's rarest birds and plants.
It looks like a cargo ship. Navy Frigate HMNZS Te Kaha's aft (back end) covered by thirty tonnes of conservation boardwalk.
Only in New Zealand.
The Navy is as keen to get the load off its ship as the Department of Conservation was to get it on.
DOC's been waiting a couple of years for the chance to take the wood to Campbell Island, New Zealand's most Southern territory 660km from Bluff. They need it to help protect the fragile home of some of the World's rarest birds and plants.
Travelling with the Navy is not only DOC, but a Royal Society contingent (including three award winning Tauranga Girls College students). There are thirty of us, and thirty less sailors as we take their places here and there in the berths, in rooms of up to twelve people.
The sailors take the intrusion in their confined midst with incredible good humour but the ten day trip is called "Operation Endurance" - fair call.
It's the trip of a lifetime, that's what everyone keeps telling me, and that the Sub-Antarctic Islands will blow me away.
They also tell me I'll probably throw up for most of the twenty four hour trip South through the Roaring Forties and into the Furious Fifties.
Wrong (initially anyway) on both counts.
We arrive in Campbell Island in pretty calm seas and one of the sailors (ex Royal Navy) tells me it looks just like the Falklands. It's greenish, flattish hills, unremarkable, I can't even see many birds.
But then we go on shore. A Campbell Island Pipit steps up to my boot. It has no fear just curiosity. This is how things once were. It's one of three land birds on the island brought back from the brink of extinction once the rats were eradicated.
We climb up a hill and what sounds like a close glider making a soft slice through the air near my ear is a large Royal Albatross. Go past their enormous nests and these stately birds stare serenely back.
Stark cliffs - strange plants found only here - grumpy sea lions - ever changing light - the island reveals why it's a World Heritage Area.
And then the weather starts to pick up. Wind comes from nowhere whipping the water off the sea and sending it skywards.
The weather's changing, the sea's starting to swell as we head
to the Auckland Islands.
