Low Tide Adventures

Saturday, 4 March 2023

This morning Jon and I went out to the forest to check some control sites for a future orienteering event. 

Then after doing some jobs at home (more on these later), we went out for my long-planned low tide adventure.  My original plan was to do a loop  around the entire St Helens point, but because low tide was quite late in the day, I had to scale it down to a much smaller loop going around Blanche point and back.

We started our adventure with a bit of a failure (as many adventures start) - we couldn't find the track we needed to take us from the road to the western foreshore.   In the end we decided our best bet was to start further south (just off the bottom of the map) where we could park almost right at the water - it added an extra few kms to our loop but since it wasn't that long anyway - it didn't really matter.  

We jogged along the foreshore north to where we should have been able to see the other end of the track we couldn't find from the road.  Instead all we could see was a beached catamaran sitting in the middle of the shallow bay.  The salty sea-dog on board saw us looking around and eventually climbed down from his boat onto the mud flats and escorted us to the track which was great as it really was quite hidden from the water side - we would never have found it by ourselves!  It turned out his boat was stuck in the bay until the next really high tide, which wasn't forecast until next year! He seemed happy enough to be there though (normally his boat is on the Humbug Point side of the bay), but he was nervous the authorities would ask him to move on - which would be difficult, as he was stuck.

With that secret track knowledge locked away for future use, we continued our journey around Blanches point to Blanches beach. The fishing must have been really good as we passed about 10 fisherman taking advantage of the low tide. We also passed the section of foreshore which turned me back last time I attempted this route in a much higher tide - I wasn't able to wade deep enough to get around all the trees in the water.

After the beach section we rejoined the road to head south back to the car. We decided to avoid a few kms on the road by cutting back out to the water again (using our new track knowledge):

Then we retraced our steps back to the car.  It was a fun adventure - about 8k long in the end and almost completely flat (and a bit wet).