Penguin-Spotting

Manda writes:

With its abundance of sunshine and mild weather, Bicheno is a popular spot with tourists. During the peak season, the local businesses do well from the extra trade but recently things have become a little unstable. Business ventures have been known to close their doors shortly after they have opened them, and in quick succession too. The fluctuation of monies generated from tourism has meant that the community relies on fishing as its main source of income. With a healthy supply of marine life in these waters, there's no worries where the next meal will come from!

Bicheno Blowhole

Bicheno is probably best known for The Blowhole - a large granite boulder that sits on the coast and due to the way it is angled, causes water to be squirted high up into the air all day long. It's impressive to watch and the beauty of it is that it is not just limited to high tide only. It is possible to walk right next to the Blowhole and not get a drenching but not so if you are pre-occupied with trying to capture it on film at the same time, as Ian found out!

[Ian adds: the camcorder got a good drenching too, the moisture getting inside the screen and knackering it a bit. Sometimes you have to suffer for your art!]

Ian standing by the Blowhole. This wasn't where he got the soaking, for the record!

Whaler's lookout is a good spot to climb up in order to get a good view of the town. From here, we could see the town centre clearly and The Gulch harbour, where all the fishing boats are moored. We didn't spot any whales though.

Penguin-spotting

In the evening, we went out to do some penguin-spotting. We'd been told by a local that we could find penguins coming in to shore to nest at dusk. Better still, it was free of charge - all we needed was a good torch (as the little penguins try to hide in the cracks between the rocks) and closed footwear (the little critters have a tendency to bite toes). As we were waiting, we tried to work out where the best vantage point was. We scanned the horizon. It was highly unlikely that they would come through the blowhole (well, not of their own accord, anyway) but it would have been so comical if they had! Just imagine it - a penguin being propelled 10m into the air, landing ungracefully on the rocks and shaking off excess water once it had regained its posture - yep, the cold weather was beginning to get to me! We chose a spot with a gradual incline from the sea and hoped for the best.

After waiting for an hour, we were beginning to wonder whether the penguins would make an appearance at all. Then we heard noises and as we shone the torch around, we could see 20 penguins waddling in to shore. A smaller group of 10 stayed together and followed our torch light. They didn't seem shy at all and watched us cautiously from a distance. We watched them too and every movement they made was intriguing. We observed them waddling, flapping their wings, swimming and arguing (two of them seemed to be arguing with each other as they had both aimed to jump on the same piece of rock, launched themselves, bounced off each other, landed on their sides, got up and started bickering).

Penguins coming ashore at Bicheno.

After watching them for an hour, we were feeling cold as the winds had picked up. Happy that we had seen them, we made tracks back to the campsite and got the fan heater going at full blast.