Snappers, eels, rays. (pictures to be added soon)

Post dive, Poor Knight Islands in the background.
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After firming up our travels plans for the next little while, Kev and I booked to dive the Poor Knights.  This is listed as amongst the top 10 dives sites in the world by a Mr. Jacques Cousteau, maybe you've heard of him?

So on the way up north from Auckland we had a unique experience of Kiwi hospitality.  A workmate of Marcos is an avid fisherman and goes out into the gulf about twice a week to fish for red snapper, and he invited Kev and I along for the morning.  Up at 5am and on the boat and on our way by 6am, dropped line in the water by 6:30am and were hauling snapper up by 7am.  I'd never really been fishing before, except at Ben's cottage where we caught nothing really big enough to eat.  However, NZ laws say that the fish must be over 27cm to keep, however, Tom our host, only keeps those over 32cm.  Practically all that we caught were over 32cm.  Kev had the catch of the day catching about a 4lbs snapper.  But I caught more.  He was very impressed by our attitudes and enthusiasm, Tom later told Marcos that we just dived right in.  (So next time at your cottage Ben you won't have to bait my hooks for me.)

Next we headed up to where we stayed the night before our dive in a hostel in Whangerei (Wh pronounced as an "F" in Maori).  If you're ever in this part of the world let me know so I can tell you about this hostel, I highly recommend it.  Our wake up call came at 6:30am and we awoke to a stormy day.  Dive! Tutukaka had to cancel our dive due to the 50knot winds that were gusting about the isalnds, so we killed a day in Whangerei.  Which turned out to be fantastic - we went to a Bird Sanctuary and were able to pet a live Kiwi.  If we hadn't done this then I'm sure that we would have left NZ without even seeing their national icon.

Weather cleared the next day and we headed up to the Poor Knights.  The reason why this dive site is meant to be so good is that it gets the warm currents from the EAC (East Australian Current - Finding Nemo anyone?) and brings the amazing sealife that usually doesn't exist on this type of volcanic rock, but only in a reef systems.  This was a cold water dive and totally different from all diving I've done in the past.  The water temperature was about 17ºC so we got geared up with full hooded 7mm wetsuits, complete with booties and jumped right in.  We saw a 2m Long-tailed Stingray, and yellow/spotted-yellow/grey moray eels.

Now our flights look like this: Auckland-Wellginton; Wellingston-Christchurch; Christchurch-Brisbane.