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| All of these photos on this post are from Milford Sound only |
I have so many pictures that I’m going to make this a two day post. I just cant pick between all the amazing photos we have from the beauty of this national park. After we finally passed through the bumpy ride on the Tasman sea, we were waiting anxiously for word on whether we could enter the Milford sound.
The Captain wasn’t receiving good news on the weather conditions the night before, but he assured us he hasn’t missed one yet. And he was right, the winds did calm enough for us to enter. It is a spectacular sight and well worth the ride. There were beautiful mountains with so many waterfalls. The clouds from the weather were very low so made for even more dramatic scenery.
Chuck said some of these photos would make Ansel Adams happy. Well, I wouldn’t go that far with my work but the paintings it made in my head and memory bank are nothing short of extraordinary. If only I could capture what my eyes can see! God’s work is incredible! It was windy and wet in the first part of the day but by the end of the day it as downright pouring.
Fiordland is the largest National Park in New Zealand and stretches over 3.1 million acres, nearly 5% the area of New Zealand and was declared by UNESCO a World Heritage Area in 1986. An interesting fact about the Fiords is that Captain Cook and his crew were the first Europeans to visit Fiordland and in 1773 spent five weeks at Pickersgill Harbour-Astronomers Point in Dusky Sound. There are 3 entrances and exits into specific Sounds we were exploring. The first was Milford sound.
This one, we drove in and did a circle and drove out. Each trip will take us about an hour to see and a couple of hours in-between so it will be a long day. But at least we don’t have to leave the ship! In researching, we found that heavy rainfall creates a permanent freshwater layer above the sea water within the Fiords. Its stained by tannin’s washed out of the vegetation so this layer cuts down the amount of light and restricts almost all the marine life to the top 40 meters of water depth.
Due to this, the captain hopes we get to see more dolphins, whales or seals but with this weather, he is doubtful. When we entered the sounds, it looked way too narrow for our ship, but I think it was because the mountains were so tall. We saw a few bottlenose dolphins on this section, but I couldn’t get my camera out quick enough.
We will see them on our next portion of our trip through. Our second entrance 2 hours later was into Thompson Sound. I’ll continue on that post tomorrow.
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