Cruising the Eastern Arctic – Sunneshine Fjord

It was our fourth day in Nunavut cruising aboard the MV Sea Adventurer. After our initial visits to Iqaluit and Pangnirtung, we were now heading towards Cape Dyer, which in a few days would be roughly our departure point across the Davis Strait to Sisimiut, Greenland.

Fog blanketed the Arctic, which meant, for the captain, it was slow going.

In the lounge, Heidi Langille, who resides in Canada’s capital city Ottawa, gave an afternoon lecture on what it was like to be an “urban Inuit”.

That evening after dinner, there was music on deck and Heidi and our other Inuit cultural emissaries demonstrated some traditional games of strength…..

….. while we cheered them on.

The next morning, the sun was warm on the east coast of Baffin Island as we made our way up the appropriately-named Sunneshine Fjord –   also seen as Sunshine Fiord in some references….

….and dropped anchor.   

The zodiacs ferried us to a wet landing on shore. It’s interesting that, if you’re a resource staffer on an Adventure Canada expedition, you must also know how to captain a zodiac. That goes for (now retired) art and culture director Carol Heppenstall, standing in the blue life-vest to the left of (now retired) expedition leader Stefan Kindberg.

When you land on an unoccupied shoreline in Nunavut, there’s a good chance that even though there are no human occupants, there may well be polar bears. Thus, our expedition leader Stefan Kindberg carried both a handgun and rifle. Fortunately, he’s never had to use them, and commented dryly: “You don’t ever want to have to shoot a polar bear in Canada. Too much paperwork!”

We were invited to explore the landing area. We could stay on the beach, work our way around the lower slopes, or climb right to the top.

My husband Doug (below) elected to stick near the shore.  I was happy we’d purchased new walking poles….

….and, again, I was delighted with my new rubber boots. Wearing them, I was able to shake up a lot of green algae in the shallow water of this intertidal zone.

I loved looking at the seaweed.  So many different species….

….. each with its own ecological community….

….. and adapted to the seasonal mix of salt and fresh glacial meltwater in the fjord.

Some of our group elected to climb to the summit, but I was most anxious to botanize on the lower slope.

This part of Sunneshine Fjord was a perfect place to be. The moraines were gently sloped, the sandy beach quite wide, the fjord deep enough for our ship, and these slopes – so monotonously featureless and olive-brown as the ship sails past them – were absolutely brimming with plant life.

Unless you get closer, you might not guess that those lighter areas on this hillside….

…… are colonies of mountain avens (Dryas integrifolia) wreathed in creeping willow shrubs.

Or that these paler drifts….

…… are Arctic heather (Cassiope tetragona), sometimes punctuated with hairy lousewort (Pedicularis hirsuta).

Here’s a closer look at hairy lousewort to illustrate the trait that earned its name.

Morning dew was still on this pair of natives: Arctic harebell (Campanula uniflora) with large-flowered wintergreen (Pyrola grandiflora).

Arctic cinquefoil (Potentilla hyparctica) is a circumpolar species, also native to Alaska, the Yukon and Norway’s Svalbard archipelago. 

Arctic blueberry or bilberry (Vaccinium uliginosum) would bear its fruit in August – with only birds and small mammals to appreciate it.

A butterfly was nectaring on moss campion (Silene acaulis).

Arctic poppies (Papaver spp.) were in flower….

….. and dwarf fireweed (Chamerion latifolium), too.

Moss had colonized the rocky outcrops in the damper areas.

There was runoff from the small glaciers beyond the summit.  Though Sunneshine Fjord is not directly related to Baffin Island’s Penny Ice Cap, it has (like all parts of the Arctic) drainage from abundant snow and ice on the upper elevations.

Here we see Arctic willow (Salix arctica) clinging to a boulder beside the waterfall.

Arctic willow grew everywhere on our expedition. One of thirteen species native to Nunavut, it grows farther north than any of the other willows and is the most common willow on Arctic islands.  Usually prostrate, it can also change its growth habit in certain circumstances and become erect, with a height up to 1 metre (3 feet).  Its hairy leaf reverse is a distinguishing characteristic, versus the similar-looking northern willow (Salix arctophila), which has glabrous or smooth leaves.  It can be very long-lived, with a Greenland specimen dated to 236 years.  Its leaves are edible and Inuit people traditionally peeled and chewed the roots of this plant they call suputiksaliit to relieve toothache – recalling the general pharmaceutical use of salicylic acid derived originally from certain Salix species as aspirin (now made synthetically).  When Arctic willow seeds ripen, they are surrounded by fluffy hairs (willow cotton) that help them disperse on the wind.

I spotted some bearberry willow (Salix uva-ursi) as well, but I was most interested in the beautiful black lichen on this rock, sensibly called black lichen (Pseudephebe minuscula, formerly Alectoria).

Here you can see how black lichen develops and grows. The study of the growth rate of lichens, by the way, is called lichenometry.

Some of the resource personnel were capturing the scene on the lower slope. This is Kenneth Lister, now retired as a curator of Arctic anthropology at the Royal Ontario Museum.  

Dennis Minty, below, is a well-known photographer on many Adventure Canada expeditions.

It was challenging to walk back to the beach through the glacial debris field.

This cobble sandbar jutting out from the beach was raised enough that I was able to make our ship look like it was sinking.

The air on the last day of July was quite warm and wisps of advection fog came and went above the cold Arctic waters.

Walking back to the beach where the zodiacs waited, I was fascinated by the stunning rock formation below, exposed by the ocean waves (and perhaps glacial ice?) along the fjord. It was beautiful and mysterious. Until this week, I hadn’t made a serious effort to discover more. This is, after all, a very isolated part of Nunavut: perhaps some Inuit fishermen come in here, the odd scientific expedition, and a handful of summer adventure cruises over the decades,(sea ice and weather willing).

The rocks, though fractured, were beautifully banded, similar to the banded gneiss, below, that I love photographing on the highway near our cottage on Lake Muskoka north of Toronto. A Precambrian rock, it is part of the Grenville Province (Muskoka Domain, Moon River Lobe) and is dated to about 1.4 billion years before the present, i.e. the Paleoproterozoic Eon (literally “before animals”).

Could my Sunneshine Fjord rocks be that old? I reached out via email to some geologists whose names I found online associated with the Cumberland Peninsula or Cape Dyer just north of the fjord. At one time during the Cold War between the west and Russia (1958-92), Cape Dyer was a radar station and part of the DEW Line, the Distant Early Warning System. Today it’s one of 40 sites across the north that has had to be cleaned up (at a cost of $575 million) to get rid of contaminated soil, fuel tanks and other debris.

I received a nice email in response from Dr. John T. Andrews, Professor Emeritus and Senior Fellow with the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research at the University of Colorado. He had done glacial/climate change research near Cape Dyer and wasn’t sure about my rock, but kindly sent me the abstract for another geologist’s paper on the region’s volcanic history. This paper describes the field relations of Tertiary basalts which are preserved as small patches intermittently along the coast for 90 km northwest from Cape Dyer, Baffin Island. The flat-lying, subaerial lavas generally rest directly on the Precambrian basement but in some localities a thin sequence of terrestrial sediments intervenes between the basement and the volcanics. Where the sediments occur, the overlying volcanics tend to be divisible into a lower unit of subaqueous volcanic breccia and an upper sequence of subaerial flows. In age, stratigraphic position and magma-type, these volcanics strongly resemble those of the basalt province of west Greenland. A model is presented for the generation of both provinces in a single volcanic episode, related to the opening of Labrador Sea – Baffin Bay by continental drift.

Wow! A volcanic episode had ruptured Greenland from Baffin Island? I suppose I should have studied up on the basic tectonic relationships of the Eastern Arctic before going further. But my banded rocks in Sunneshine Fjord didn’t look like the columnar basalt formations from the Columbia River Basalt Flood, below, that I had photographed in northeast Oregon two years ago and written about in my blog on Oregon’s Thomas Condon Paleontology Center.

After a few days of searching on Google, I must have put in some magical search parameters (fiord, not fjord, etc.) and came up with a Research Canada page containing a full geological map of the area around Sunneshine Fjord, below!

http://publications.gc.ca/collections/collection_2013/rncan-nrcan/M183-1-6-2011-eng.pdf

When I enlarged the map, I thought I could spot the exact area with the cobble sandbar that we had visited, marked with a red arrow below!

Detail from http://publications.gc.ca/collections/collection_2013/rncan-nrcan/M183-1-6-2011-eng.pdf

The lead author was geologist Dr. Mary Sanborn-Barrie. I sent off an email with photos of my rocks, but didn’t hear anything back right away. Maybe she was in the field, out of wifi range, dubious about such a random email from someone she didn’t know? But then I received a reply from her and it made me so happy. Because my rocks were old, really really old!

Hi Janet

What a beautiful exposure of rocks you were able to explore on the shoreline. Our mode of transport was helicopter drop-off and then walking all day, so we rarely (if ever) got to map such gorgeous wave-washed exposures.

Actually your photographs appear to be of the oldest rocks in the region, rather than the youngest! They appear representative of the deformed and layered Archean (A) tonalite gneiss (tg) basement (unit Atg in the legend below) that underlies much of Cumberland Peninsula and which is dated at two localities at 2,990 million years old and 2,940 million years old.  The pale grey layers are foliated tonalite and any biotitic and/or mica-rich layers (unit Asp in the legend below) are likely even older sediments that were intruded by the tonalite.  Upon closer inspection, such mica-rich may also contain garnet and/or silky silvery sillimanite – both minerals diagnostic of high-alumina sedimentary rocks.

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Here’s an enlargement of the legend to which she referred:

Detail of legend http://publications.gc.ca/collections/collection_2013/rncan-nrcan/M183-1-6-2011-eng.pdf

I was so happy I’d made closeup images of the rock layers, below. Imagine! These Archean rocks at 2.99 – 2.94 Ga (Giga annum or billion years) are twice as old as the rocks on the highway near my cottage, from an eon whose name comes from the same root as “archaic” stretching back 4 billion years.

I had photographed the upper slope from the beach, below, and all I could see was more of the same, but there were, in fact, some much younger rocks in places at the top of the cliffs on Sunneshine Fjord. Dr. Sanborn-Barrie included information about those rocks as well, as she continued in her email (below my photo).

These tectonically layered rocks (as opposed to the bedded (primary layering=strata) observed in the Tertiary sequence) underlie (that is, they are low on the cliffs) the much younger, unconformably overlying Tertiary basalts that erupted about 60-55 million years ago during spreading of the Baffin basin. She also enclosed a photo of herself examining those overlying Tertiary basalts with a view across the fjord to basalts atop the ancient rock.

Photo of geologist Mary Sanborn-Barrie by mapping co-leader, geologist Michael Young

And she provided an info-card using a photo from Sunneshine Fjord showing what is meant in geology by “unconformably” or “unconformity” (n.): meaning “a series of younger strata that do not succeed the underlying older rocks in age or in parallel position, as a result of a long period of erosion or nondeposition.” Thus, we don’t know what happenened here between 2.9 Ga and 60-55 Ma because all the physical evidence for that vast period has disappeared. That break in the record is called a “hiatus”.

Photo courtesy Dr. Mary Sanborn-Barrie, Research Canada

Returning now to that wonderful last day of July in 2013, it was time for us to climb into the zodiacs, board the ship and take our leave of Sunneshine Fjord.

It was so warm outdoors that a barbecue lunch was served on the rear deck……

…… complete with grilled chicken and steak.

Passing an iceberg…..

…..we bade farewell to the coast of Baffin Island, Nunavut and Canada.

Hours later, I was happy I hadn’t consumed too much wine at that lovely lunch because I was flat on my back in my bunk, having taken a motion sickness pill and given up on trying to read. Every now and again, I’d pull myself up to look out the window at the 9-foot swells that had the ship rocking back and forth like a slow amusement ride… for hours and hours.  My husband, who doesn’t get seasick, returned from dinner and announced cheerily: “Well, you’re in the majority! And some people left the dining room in a big hurry!”  I groaned and closed my eyes and thought of a young Charles Darwin, often seasick in his hammock on his five-year voyage aboard The Beagle.  “I hate every wave of the ocean, with a fervor,” he wrote to a cousin in 1835.

Fortunately, morning did come, the seas calmed, and we arrived on a sunny August 1st on the west coast of Greenland. Coming up in my next blog: Sisimiut.

A Night on Doubtful Sound

Our 9th touring day on the American Horticultural Society’s ‘Gardens, Wine & Wilderness’ tour saw us leave Queenstown and drive south on Highway 6 along Lake Wakatipu.

Highway 6-Otago-Lake Wakatipu

We were heading to Fiordland National Park, 173 km (107 miles) and just over 2 hours away.

Queenstown to Fiordland-Google Map

A few bus window impressions of the countryside along the route included a colourful way to protect tree seedlings alongside matagouri or ‘wild Irishman’ shrubs (Discaria toumatou) …..

Matagouri and sapling protection-Otago-Highway 6-New Zealand

…… and native cabbage trees (Cordyline australis) along the shore of Wakatipu.

Cordyline australis-Lake Wakatipu-Highway 6

Crossing from Otago into Southland, there were farms with hay bales in ubiquitous plastic wrappers…..

Hay Bales-Southland-New Zealand

…. and lots and lots of sheep.

Sheep farm-Southland-New Zealand

We had a brief stop in little Mossburn, which bills itself as the “deer capital of New Zealand”. Not native deer, of course, since New Zealand doesn’t have any. They were Eurasian red deer (Cervus elaphus) imported originally by colonists in the 19th century, then escaped into the wild and now farmed or hunted for venison (as is wapiti or American elk). In fact, Fiordland National Park, where we were headed, encourages sport hunting of deer, wild pigs, elk and chamois since they compete with native birds for certain trees and plants.

Mossburn-Deer stag statue

We ate our picnic lunch at the Fiordland Cruise Dock on Lake Manapōuri, where I photographed this complicated explanation to the hydro-electric project at the west end of the lake that is considered to be the birthplace of New Zealand’s environmental awareness.  For it was in 1970 that 10-percent of New Zealanders signed the Save Manapōuri petition, drawn up to counter a plan conceived over the previous two decades to create a power plant that would require the flooding of both Lake Manapōuri and nearby Lake Te Anau by raising the water by up to 30 metres (100 feet), thus flooding the lake’s islands completely and drowning the beech shoreline. When the government resisted the protestors, owing to a pledge mandated in 1963 to develop an aluminum smelter with hydro-power from the plant, it was subsequently defeated in the 1972 election. The new Labour government formed the Guardians of Lake Manapōuri, Monowai and Te Anau to manage the lake levels sensitively, which they continue to do today. (Click on the photo below to see a larger version.)

Manapouri Hydro Scheme-hydrology

We were thrilled to be heading out on Manapōuri, the first leg of our overnight cruise on Fiordland’s Doubtful Sound. The captain of the small boat that conveys passengers to the dock at Manapōuri Power Station did a nice job of talking about the lake…..

Lake Manapouri-Boat Captain

….. which you could choose to listen to, or head out on deck where the wind was amazing.

Lake Manapouri-Boat to West Arm Jetty

Fifty minutes later, we arrived at the jetty beside the water intake of the huge Manapōuri Power Station, below, which generates enough power for 618,000 average homes. Although it’s not evident here, there is a 178-metre (584-foot) drop from Lake Manapōuri to Doubtful Sound; it’s this gradient difference that made the site so attractive for hydro power.  The massive machine hall, which was hollowed out of granite deep within the mountain is accessible via a 2 kilometre (1.2 mile) spiral tunnel that can be visited by tourists at certain times.  To learn more about this monumental project, have a look at this short YouTube film.

Lake Manipouri-West Arm-Power Station-Fiordland

A bus was waiting for us, and off we went on the 22 kilometre(13-mile) 40-minute journey across the Wilmot Pass on a gravel road that had been constructed between 1963 and 1965 to accommodate the trucks hauling large equipment from Doubtful Sound to the new power station.

Wilmot Pass between Manapouri and Doubtful Sound-map

Our bus driver was a bit of a stand-up (sit-down?) comic and we enjoyed his informative, witty commentary.  After climbing the pass for a while, we arrived at a lookout that gave us a beautiful view of Doubtful Sound. Established in 1952 Fiordland National Park is huge: 12,607 square kilometres (4,868 square miles).  Though there are other places to visit in the park, accepted wisdom is that a cruise here (given its isolation, only one tour company, Real Journeys does this overnight stay) is one of the best ways to experience this stunning part of the park.

Wilmot Pass-Doubtful Sound View-Fiordland

Though a brief stop, it gave some of us a chance to do some fast botanizing. There was mountain ribbonwood (Hoheria glabrata)……

Hoheria glabrata-Wilmot Pass-Doubtful Sound-Fiordland

…… and koromiko or willow-leaf hebe (Hebe salicifolia/Veronica salicifolia).

Hebe salicifolia-Koromiko-Wilmot Pass-Doubtful Sound-Fiordland

Back on the bus, we descended to the dock in Deep Cove where the Fiordland Navigator, our cruise boat and hotel for the night, was awaiting us. I had just enough time to peek through the shrubbery on shore at Helena Falls, one of many near-vertical waterfalls in the sound.

Helena Falls-Deep Cove-Doubtful Sound

….. before boarding the boat.

Boarding-Fiordland Navigator-Deep Cove-Doubtful Sound-Fiordland

Then we were off, sailing in a northwest direction into Doubtful Sound. Forty kilometres (25 miles) long and 421 metres (1381 feet) deep at its deepest point, it’s technically a “fiord” carved by successive glaciers (the last being 18,000-28,000 years ago), not a “sound”, which is a river valley that has been flooded by the sea.

Fiordland Navigator-Into Doubtful Sound

(Now, a small confession about the next images, in case anyone is knowledgeable about the specific order of the different parts of Doubtful Sound. It’s a good idea, when you bring 3 cameras and a cellphone with you, to make sure they’re ALL on local time. In my case, only my phone was hooked into real time in New Zealand.  Enough said.)

Soon we were passing the near shore of Elizabeth Island, site of the Taipari Roa Marine Reserve. It was thrilling to see this dense ecosystem of rainforest plants. In parts of Fiordland National Park, rainfall can exceed 6000 mm (236 inches-20 feet) but Doubtful Sound generally receives one-third that amount.

Elizabeth Island-shore-Doubtful Sound

The grass-like plant is Astelia (likely A. nervosa).

Elizabeth Island-Astelia-Doubtful Sound

Here is the sign for the Marine Reserve.  Covering 613 hectares (1514 acres), it features black and red corals and rare yellow sea sponges. A pod of bottlenose dolphins regularly visits, and as if on cue……..

Elizabeth Island-Taipari Ro Marine Preserve

….. we were alerted by an announcement from the Navigator’s captain that a mother and calf were swimming near the boat.

Bottlenose dolphins-Tursiops truncatus-mother and calf-Doubtful Sound

They were two of a community of around 56 dolphins (2008 figures), and their declining numbers have mandated Dolphin Protection Zones in Doubtful Sound. But chance encounters are fine. and our captain maintained his heading while the pair swam alongside. The next day, we saw a bigger pod of bottlenose dolphins in the sound, and I combined video of the mother and calf with that group in the following little film.

The natural history of Doubtful Sound was made exciting by Carol of Real Journeys, who told me she never tires of the spectacular sights here.

Carol-naturalist-Real Journeys-Fiordland-

Look at this amazing ‘gneiss’ basement rock, whose little steps and fissures become the birthplace of a vertical rainforest.

Gneiss-Doubtful Sound

I could photograph rock all day.
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Shore rock formation-Doubtful Sound

Gazing back down the sound, I was captivated by the blue silhouettes of the mountains behind Deep Cove, including lofty Mount George.

Mount George-Elizabeth Island-Doubtful Sound

The wind picked up as we neared the mouth of Doubtful Sound and the Tasman Sea.  Here on the Nee Islets, we saw a colony of fur seals.

New-Zealand-Fur seals and gulls-Nee Islets-Doubtful Sound

The seals rest during the day and dive at night for fish, sometimes as deep as 160 metres (525 feet).  Here we see the rough Tasman Sea crashing into the rocks.

New Zealand fur Seal colony-kekeno-Doubtful Sound-Tasman Sea

The sea was named for Dutch seafarer and explorer Abel Tasman, who also gave his name to Tasmania. In 1642, he became the first European to sight what he called Staten Landt at the northwest corner of the South Island. It was later renamed Nieuw Zeeland (New Holland) by a cartographer with the Dutch East India Company.

Tasman Sea-Abel Tasman-1642

The next European to reach New Zealand’s shore was English sea captain and explorer James Cook. On March 14th, 1770 Captain Cook wrote the following in his log after considering, then rejecting, the idea of navigating into the body of water that he would call Doubtful Harbour.  “The land on each side the Entrance of this Harbour riseth almost perpendicular from the Sea to a very considerable Height; and this was the reason why I did not attempt to go in with the Ship, because I saw clearly that no winds could blow there but what was right in or right out, that is, Westerly or Easterly; and it certainly would have been highly imprudent in me to have put into a place where we could not have got out but with a wind that we have lately found to blow but one day in a Month. I mention this because there was some* on board that wanted me to harbour at any rate, without in the least Considering either the present or future Consequences.” (*The person to whom Cook was referring was the ship botanist Joseph Banks.)

Captain James Cook-Dusky Sound-Second voyage-Resoluton-March 1770

I am a great fan of Captain James Cook.  Why? A little personal aside that has to do with 18th century explorers. As a young child, I lived on Pembroke Street in Victoria, British Columbia.  HMS Pembroke was the name of the ship James Cook served on in 1758 during the British war against the French in Quebec. Victoria is on Vancouver Island, B.C., named for British sea captain and explorer George Vancouver, who charted the Pacific Northwest in 1791-92 aboard HMS Discovery (which had been under Cook’s command 12 years earlier). I caught my bus to school on Cook Street named for Captain Cook…..

Captain James Cook-by Nathaniel Dance-Holland-1776

…..who made three voyages to the southern hemisphere between 1768 and his murder in Hawaii in 1779 while captaining HMS Discovery. On that first voyage with Joseph Banks he did not linger long off the coast.  But on his second voyage (1772-75) on the Resolution – which included midshipman George Vancouver, above – he explored and charted Dusky Sound (36 miles south of Doubtful Sound) from March to May, 1773, while repairing his ship, botanizing and engaging peacefully with local Māori.  And my school was on Humboldt Street, named for yet another explorer, the great German botanist Alexander von Humboldt, 1769-1859.

We turned away from the Tasman Sea and made our way back down Doubtful Sound, sailing alongside immense mountain walls cloaked with trees, shrubs, ferns and mosses.

Rainforest mountainside-Doubtful Sound

Look at these fabulous southern rāta trees (Metrosideros umbellata) with their red flowers.

Metrosideros-umbellata-Southern rātā-Doubtful Sound

We saw more rātas dotting the slopes on the sound, which also feature tree ferns (Cyathea smithii).

Metrosideros umbellata-southern rata-Doubtful Sound

One of the fun features of the Real Journeys overnight cruise is the chance to get into a kayak or small tender to explore one of the quiet arms of Doubtful Sound.

Kayaking-Real Journeys-Doubtful Sound-Fiordland Navigator

I elected the tender…..

Kayaking-Doubtful-Sound-Fiordland Naviator

….. but you can see the massive scale of the setting compared to the kayaks.

Kayaks-Doubtful Sound-Fiordland

Up close, we could see the epiphytic moss hanging from trees……

Moss-epiphytic-Doubtful Sound

….. and the terrestrial mosses on the rock. Throughout the sound, it is mosses that give the rock faces a foothold for the ferns (like the crown ferns, Blechnum discolor, below) and seed plants that come later.

Moss-terrestrial-crown ferns-Blechnum discolor-Doubtful Sound

But even when the rocky mountainsides become fully covered in plants, the weight of that biomass at the steepest angles combined with heavy rainfall or snowload often results in “tree avalanches”  that cascade down the slopes, leaving the rock exposed once again.

Tree avalanche-Doubtful Sound

And of course the rock face itself often fissures and……

Rock Cracks-Doubtful Sound

…… giant rock falls to the fiord shore as well, where it will gradually erode.

Rock4

With our little exploration finished, we reboarded the Fiordland Navigator where we enjoyed a lovely buffet dinner. (You can see images of the ship’s interior and staterooms in the previous link). With the ship at anchor in the arm, we turned in for the night and enjoyed the sound of rain when it began in early morning.

And what a morning! I felt like I’d awakened in a National Geographic magazine cover.

Cloud-Doubtful Sound

Cloud and mist shrouded the mountains and hanging valleys around us in the same primeval way it has bathed this temperate rainforest in moisture for thousands of years.

Shrouded-trees-Doubtful-Sou

It felt magical, as if the towering rimu trees (Dacrydium cypressinum) and beeches had poked their crowns through the clouds to breathe….

Misty trees-Doubtful Sound-rainforest

…. After breakfast, I dressed in the raincoat I wore for the very first time in New Zealand……

Day2-Janet Davis-Fiordland Navigator-Doubtful Sound

…. so I could enjoy the weather.

Rainfall Doubtful Sound

I loved this thin waterfall splashing down behind the kātote (Cyathea smithii) tree ferns with their persistent frond stems.

Waterfall & tree ferns-katote-Cyathea smithii-Doubtful Sound

We were nearing the end of our cruise but there was one more magical moment to come.  The “Sound of Silence” has become something of an iconic experience aboard the Fiordland Navigator since “place of silence” is the English translation for the Māori word for Doubtful Sound, Patea.  It was a magical few minutes, floating, boat engines turned off, with just the odd clang from the kitchen or someone’s packing noise in a neaby cabin to intrude on the sound of water lapping and birds calling on shore.. But it gives you a little sensation of the wonder of this primeval place of beauty and silence.

https://youtu.be/wJs_YvO4kes