DOUBTFUL SOUND

FRIDAY 6th MAY

  If Milford Sound was great then this trip to Doubtful Sound was terrific.  I was picked up from the motel at 8.45am.  After picking up a few more trippers, the small coach drove us to Lake Manopouri.  A catamaran

took us the length of the lake to West Arm, where New Zealand's largest hydro power station is located.  The idea of building a power station here was first mooted in 1904, but work didn't start until Consolidated Zinc Pty of Australia built an aluminium smelter in Bluff and needed an enormous amount of constant electricity to run it.  They got permission to build the power station.  This was only after initial plans to raise the level of Lake Manopouri by some 30m were defeated by conservationist, and the station was built underground and the lake level remained as it was.  Work started in 1964 under the auspices of the New Zealand government as the company couldn't afford the cost of the construction work.  Allied to this a road was built to Deep Cove through the Wilmot Pass to connect Doubtful Sound with Lake Manopouri.  The road is the most expensive stretch of road in New Zealand, cost $2/cm - the road is some 20 odd Km long.

                                View from the top of the Wilmot Pass on to Doubtful Sound.
Another boat was waiting for us in Doubtful Sound and this took us out along the Sound.

 We came across blue nosed dolphins and a couple of them leapt out of the water.  Unfortunately it all happened too quickly to catch on camera, although I did get a picture of two of them just breaking the surface. (See above).

 The boat also attracted a number of albatrosses which swooped and flew around us.  Again not easy to capture on camera, but I'm glad to say I managed it.

We went into the Tasman Sea where the boat pitched and rolled a bit, one had to hang onto the handrail for dear life.  But the boat drew up along side some rocks jutting out in the mouth of Doubtful Sound which housed a whole colony of fur seals.

Out on the left hand side of the mouth were two rocks known as the Hare's Ears.  Captain Cook noted them when he sailed down the coast in the late seventeen hundreds, but didn't enter the Sound.  It was either him or an other explorer who said it was doubtful if it would make a good harbour - hence Dobtful Sound.

 The boat had a GP navigation system which showed where the boat was at any moment in time on a map screen, the boat's position denoted by a black spot.

 On the way back we pulled into one of the arms of the Sound and came across a second batch of dolphins.  This time I caught them on the camcorder, although I managed a couple od snaps as well.

After returning to Deep Cove, the coach took us to see the two water tail race tunnels that had been cut out from the hydro power station to discharge the water into Doubtful Sound.   The first was done by hand drills and blasting, the second was bored out in a fraction of the time by a Swedish boring machine, some years later to alleviate the back pressure.  Both tunnels are 9m in diameter. We stopped at various points on the Wilmot Pass for photo opportunities, which I took full advantage of.  Some of the beech trees in the rainforest are some 600 years old, which by my calculation makes them as old as the Komorowski family.

Once we got over to Lake Maopouri, the coach drove down into the bowels of the power station where we then entered the generation chamber.  This is located 200m below the level of Lake Manopouri.

Work on the power station started in 1964 and took eight years to complete.  16 men lost their lives during the construction, and it took a total of 1800 workers to complete the project over an 8 year period. 

Turning the coach around was a tricky proposition and the laconic driver, who confessed he was a redundant telephone engineer, said he had been practising the turn for some time!  He also said that the road across Wilmot Pass was the only road the company would allow him to drive on, as they didn't trust him on motorways!  After the visit we again boarded our boat to go back to the other side of the lake.

After being dropped off at the motel, I had my last lingering bath before watching Australia fairly comprehensively defeat New Zealand in the Anzac Test Match at Rugby League.