See also:
Packrafting North Island (NZ)

Fjordland National Park in the far southwest of New Zealand’s South Island is a huge, barely inhabited warren of 1000-m+ mountain ridges, deep 40-km inlets and alpine lakes. Milford Sound is the best known of these glacier-carved fjords, reaching inland from the Tasman Sea. Every day convoys of buses drive the spectacular Milford Sound road to cruise the Sound.
We chose the less visited Doubtful Sound further south for a spot of rental kayaking.

However you do it, getting to Doubtful requires crossing the 35-km width of Lake Manapouri (above, map below) to a jetty alongside NZ’s biggest hydro electric scheme (left). Unseen below and carved out of the granite is a huge generating hall housing the turbines.
Just about every South Island lake seems to have been repurposed for power generation, producing up to 85% of the island’s electricity. 

From the jetty a steep road leads over Wilmots Pass (above), then drops into Deep Cove school camp at the eastern extent of Doubtful Sound, noted by Cook on his 1770 expedition. This private road was built to serve the remote hydro construction from the sea. Water drops 240m from Lake Manapouri through a pair of 10-km-long granite tunnels draining into Doubtful Sound, generating electricity for a smelter in nearby Bluff. Five hundred cumecs adds up to a cubic kilometre (a billion litres) of water every three weeks to freshen up the salty reach of Deep Cove.

Prevailing westerlies off the Tasman Sea dump up to 8 metres of rain on this side of the Alps each year, keeping those lakes topped up while sustaining a dense, primeval rain forest of evergreens and ferns right out of Jurassic Park, clinging to the steep valley sides from the ridge crests all the way down to the tide line.

Mineral, vegetable and probably some slow moving animals, everything gets clad in bright green moss, even old rope, but for all that running water and greenery it’s barely inhabitable terrain dominated by 60° slopes andeven cliffs thick with impenetrable vegetation.
We’d arrived after a spell of rain which saw 1000-foot waterfalls streaming down the slopes, fed by unseen tarns far above. By the second day they’d dried up.

Our guide Blake explained there was no soil on these slopes. Once exposed by the retreating ice cap 12,000 years ago, lichen (algae-fungus) attracts moss, then ferns gain a footing and finally huge beech trees rise up, clinging to cracks in the rock and each other. Periodically they let go in a spectacular ‘treevalanche’, exposing a strip of bare rock and the floral colonisation process resumes.

A service boat from Deep Cove jetty means kayak groups can be dropped off or collected anywhere in the Sound in minutes, depending on the day’s winds. Our afternoon paddle saw us dropped off at the head of Halls Arm, 13km from Deep Cove. Down here about fifty days a year are sunny and we were lucky enough to grab two in a row. It was a bit disappointing to see tour boats here too, but they kept their distance or provided fun wakes to bounce across.

In Halls Arm eight of us slipped into four Necky Amaruks, a discontinued 6.4m roto double, just 66cm wide but clocking in at 42 kilos, like Jeff’s Perception tanker on Shark Bay and Ningaloo, in WA. We probably last paddled a hardshell double along Croatia’s Korati Islands in Croatia, 30 years ago. The good thing with hardshells is you sit virtually on the floor and below the waterline, like a packraft but at nearly half the width, which means the boat is stable and fast while still sitting low on the water, less prone to winds.

Today I sat in the back with the rudder, but failed to adjust for comfort, which ended up disagreeing with my bad leg and bad back. Occasionally an Omnium would slip off the pedal – less thick soles are better – and after flailing hopelessly trying to reconnect, I’d have to remove the skirt and reach in to unfold the peg.

I’ve experimented with or had IKs with rudders, but in the end decided they weren’t essential for my sort of fair-weather day-trips (as opposed to overnighters, where you’ll get all weather when a rudder can help).
You’d think you just set the rudder straight to go straight, but I found myself constantly finessing the pedals and zig-zagging while trying to synch with the Mrs’ cadence up front, a bit like patting the head and rubbing the stomach.
By the time we got back to Deep Cove jetty after two 2-hour spells, me and a similarly older guy had to be winched out like sacks of wheat. The minimally-padded seats saw to that, not helped by the lack of a solid footrest for support. We’re not the first to experience hardshell agony of course, but like bike saddles you either get used to it or find one that suits you.

Next day I grabbed the front seat and directed the Mrs to steerage. This was much more like it! Solid foot placements and a great view. This time we paddled out of the Sound alongside Elizabeth Island, passing a textbook hanging valley carved out by a former side glacier.

Returning up the north side of the island, we took a break at a tidal cove free of sand flies, the nemeses of New Zealand’s west coast. Blake said yesterday’s smoko had been sand fly hell, but being bigger, satisfyingly swattable and far less numerous than Scottish midges, I’ll take Kiwi sand flies any day, even if they give the same itchy bites.

Heading back up to Deep Cove we came across some of the bottlenose dolphins which inhabit the Sound. The pod passed right by our boats.

Then the last half hour turned into a slog. It wasn’t a headwind and it couldn’t be the meagre 2-m tide, which was on the turn. Which only left the smelter down in Bluff demanding peak magawatts so someone at Manapouri hydro had turned the taps on full.
Other than that the tour’s pace was slow and the day after we both noted the lack of shoulder aches. When we were in synch, the Necky zipped along at an easy 6kph or more. It would have been interesting to see how it or we handled in windier, choppier conditions.
But even then, a spell of hard shelling in a clammy wetsuit reminded me why I like IKs and Ps. Out in the fresh air, you can see your feet, access stuff easily, sit on cushy air and of course hop in and out like a squirrel on a pogo stick. They say the Necky Lochsa which replaced the Amaruk had bigger cockpits, but you’ve still got 20 feet and 40+ kilos of plastic to store and transport; I saw one on ebay.nz going for just 300 quid. But for this type of use – left on site for months – they’re ideal and indestructable. An SoT double (if such things exist) would be door-wide and slow.

It was great to paddle Fjordland and take a visit to the dark side, but for the sort of paddling I enjoy, I’ll still take an IK or P.