Martin's Bay to Big Bay

Originally uploaded by m_hagen

I left Martin's Bay Hut after a breakfast of porridge and coffee. Said my goodbye's to the Kiwi fishermen and started down the track in a light drizzle. The track to Long Reef is good but as soon as you start heading east into Big Bay it changes dramatically. At times there is no path and you have to push through the bush keeping an eye out for tiny orange triangles or buoy's people have tied to trees which mark the route. It got pretty stressful at times. It started to rain pretty heavily and I was climbing into and out of steep ravines, stepping into knee deep mud, all the time trying to keep an eye out for those damn triangles so I wouldn't wander off the route.

After a couple of hours of this I made it down to the beach which felt great. It wasn't a flat sandy beach though. It was a scramble over rocks, reefs,cobblestones and shells. I saw more abalone shells littering the beach than I've ever seen in my life! There was no shelter from the rain so I pushed on to Mackenzie Creek. I tried following the trail to the river crossing on the DOC map which was a mistake. I followed the trail till it disappeared into flax bush behind an estuary when my instinct had told me to stay on the beach. I ended up stumbling along deer trails for an extra half hour which zigzagged all over the place. Sometimes I was knee deep in mud, other times I had to crawl through the bush making sure my board wasn't getting dinged up... I finally thought I saw a clearing and made my way towards it only to find out I was on the edge of a creek with no bank to walk on. I was getting pretty fed up at this point and soaked to the bone by the rain, so I jumped into the waist deep freezing water, held my board on the surface to keep steady and waded about 50 yards downstream to the beach I could've walked right up if I'd listened to my instincts! Mackenzie Creek was nothing after that. I was feeling pretty cold so, now that I was finally on relatively flat ground I picked up the pace as best as I could against the northerly wind for the final 3 miles up the beach to Big Bay Hut.

Noticing a couple of buoy's tied to some sticks back from the beach I followed them over the sand dunes, through a forest of flax and finally found the hut a few hundred yards back from the ocean. It felt really good to make a fire, get dry, and change clothes. Pretty exciting day of tramping. I now know the difference in New Zealand between a track, (a well maintained walking trail) and a route, (general directions with next to zero maintenance, an overgrown deer track). The last time any work was done to clear the route to Big Bay was over five years ago.