The Cream Trip

 
November 8th

Staying in the Bay of Islands, you can’t miss out on a day on the water. There are over 80 islands and the larger ones used to be farmed. The Cream Trip is named after the daily journey taken by the boat The Dairy Maid to collect full milk churns and deliver supplies and post. When seas were rough, the milk had turned to cream before the boat docked. Thankfully the sea was calm and flat today – so flat that the captain was able to take the boat through the famous hole in the rocks, with just a few feet to spare on either side.

The leisure boat still delivers mail three times a week to the few remaining inhabited islands, and our guide had plenty of tales about the early settlers. But the real attraction of the trip was the chance to see dolphins and other wildlife. There isn’t a resident dolphin pod in the bay, but they are frequent visitors and today we got lucky. We had only been on the water for half an hour or so when we spotted a dorsal fin and one, two, three, four, five, six dolphins came over to take a look at us – swimming round and under the boat, leaping out the water, dancing in twos and threes for our entertainment.

But the entertainment went two ways. 15 hardy souls donned shorty wetsuits and got in the cold water (barely 14degreesC) to swim with them. Our boat captain reckoned the dolphins would only hang around if our swimmers amused them. If nothing else, they amused those of us who stayed on deck! To begin with the swimmers had to clamber into a net hung from the side of the boat and wait there until the captain gave the order to swim. The rest of us acted as dolphin spotters with shouts of “two off the starboard bow”, “three of them, straight ahead”, and when the swimmers finally struck out in the water, “look down” and, the inevitable, “they’re behind you!” When the dolphins got too far away, the swimmers were instructed to get back in the nets until they approached again, and the next round of fun began.