Away with the ferries
It's survival of the fittest on Cook Strait ferries, writes Ewan Sargent.
We are parked in lane 2 at Picton. It’s a good spot, about three or four cars from the front. It’s a hot day as it always is when parked in a line of cars waiting your turn to board a ferry.
They have just started calling the lines and lane 1 is under way, trundling off in a slow convoy for the bowels of the Interislander ferry. My wife says she needs something from the back of the family wagon. She jumps out and runs around the back and lifts the boot.
‘‘Get back in the car,’’ I yell, but she doesn’t hear, or care. She has this.
Lane 1 has emptied and panic rises. The boot is still up and she is head down, deep under the boogie boards. Now a Fluoro-Vest Guy is waving our lane forward.
I’m yelling. The kids are yelling. The car in front of us moves off and now we are head of lane 2. Except we can’t go anywhere. The boot’s still up. Lane 2 waits. Fluoro-Vest Guy gives one last disgusted look as I ignore his waves and turns to lane 3 and waves it on. Incredulous lane 3 cars drive past, faces gawping at us at the windows.
I can imagine what people in the lane 2 cars behind us are saying because I know what I would be saying.
The boot comes down and my wife is back inside. Let’s stop there. Even years later it’s hard to type and cringe at the same time. Of course, now we ask ‘‘do we need anything from the back?’’ every time the boarding lane starts moving and always will.
Ferry sailings between Picton and Wellington always have a big cameo role in our road trip holidays.
We live in Christchurch but regularly drive back north where we came from, always at peak holiday time just after Christmas.
The ferry sailings come at the very beginning of the road trip when the family is re-learning how to get on together cramped in a packed tight car. The ferry home comes when everyone has the holiday-over empty feeling. We feel flat, sunburned, tired and with only another year of study or work to look forward to.
Over the years, we saw our daughters go from little things sitting cross-legged in perfect year 1 position on the mat, watching a magic show on deck 7 to teens scrunched in a seat in an amazing knot of gangly legs and arms, holding a phone and with earbuds in, looking up and saying: ‘‘Seriously, are you actually asking me that?’’
All part of the changing tapestry of family life.
We laugh at the unreal ‘‘cruising on the Interislander’’ ads. They show all those empty seats, sunny days, no intense German backpackers semi-camping by the stairwell, no drunk touring sports teams in the bar, no queues outside the women’s toilets and no food flying when a rogue side wave hits.
But the scenery is as real as the ads show and is that beautiful.
Every trip to the ferry has started and ended the same way. It begins in Christchurch with a promised early start that doesn’t quite happen.
Led Zeppelin’s Stairway To Heaven would make the perfect soundtrack. A slow, dainty beginning that matches the relaxed holiday tootle to Cheviot. There we have a coffee stop, a snack no-one needs but had with the idea of not needing to eat on the ferry, and it’s also a good time to check if anything is needed from the boot . . .
Then the pace picks up. At Kaiko¯ ura, we realise we have once again misjudged timings (in latter years, Google Maps will confirm it) and we are now running late to get there an hour before the sailing. All further stops are cancelled . . . Jimmy Page launches an extended guitar solo . . . the song and road trip gather pace.
By Blenheim, we are arguing over the current speed camera threshold and whether 109 is OK. The only memory of the stretch between Spring Creek and Picton is a blur of fields, some mountains maybe, fences, idiot too-slow cars up front and more blur.
We are always late. Except once when we got there in time to be at the head of lane 2 . . . Parking on the ferry is stressful because it challenges a lifetime of not wanting directions. The Fluoro-Vest Guys or Girls always want you to park much closer than you want to.
Keep coming, keep coming, they finger wave, like Morpheus from The Matrix .I creep, they wave, then when a bump and setting the next car’s alarm off seems inevitable, there’s a frantic flat palm STOP! Always this brinkmanship.
Once the car ended up out on the open deck. We could see it from the passenger deck above so it became an instant attraction, something to look at and photograph as the majestic Marlborough Sounds hills slid slowly past. It was like spotting someone you know on TV. Ooh, look. I know that car.
Being late to the ferry has
consequences because when we get on determines whether we can sit together. The Holy Grail is four seats together around a table.
We split up and roam the ferry, hunting for seats, texting updates, possibilities, trying to find some suitable patch of empty seats we can converge at. We know the ferries well so we hunt well.
We are up against the foot traffickers and lane 1 car passengers who got on early. Some are now claiming three seats with a foot on one and a bag on another. They have headphones on and stare straight ahead or pretend to sleep to deflect our hate looks.
It’s ugly and primal but something usually works out. Two here, two there and slowly we inch closer as the tide of seat ownership changes. The family bonding is also beginning, because we are hunting as a pack.
Packs eat together too, and that’s another story.
Ferry food is ferry food. We always start the holiday promising no more bad food. We take fruit on board. Then we always buy fries, deep-fried things, pies, snake lollies, hot chocolates and more coffee in a frenzy of putting something in the mouth, rather than just sitting still and doing nothing.
Two of us tend to get seasick. Two of us don’t and can’t understand the drama of the two that do. Here’s a conversation that’s been repeated over and over on
We laugh at the unreal ‘‘cruising on the Interislander’’ ads. They show all those empty seats, sunny days, no intense German backpackers semi-camping by the stairwell, no drunk touring sports teams in the bar, no queues outside the women’s toilets and no food flying when a rogue side-wave hits. But the scenery is as real as the ads show and is that beautiful.
rough sea crossings for a decade:
‘‘I feel sick.’’
‘‘Look out the window into the distance, that helps. Stand on the deck, get some fresh air.’’
‘‘No. I feel too sick to look out. Don’t want to go on the deck.’’ (Eyes shut, hunched over trying to keep still.) ‘‘But it works.’’
‘‘No. Leave me alone. Actually, don’t leave me alone. I need a sick bag – now.’’
But another thing that never changes is the chance to stare out at the Sounds and the sea. On good crossings, we play cards, read a book and chat. It’s a good way of slowing everything down and getting the mind into holiday mode.
If we spot the Bluebridge, we say ‘hah, this is half-an-hour faster, so much better’. If we are on Bluebridge and spot the Interislander, we say ‘hah, who cares about speed and that’s a cattle truck compared to this’.
I think everyone stares way down at the cold blue-green ocean and wonders what it would be like to fall in. When younger, the girls liked to think about this with lots of gory detail about hypothermia and so on, then finish up by being reassured that we’d throw one of those big red rings down and jump in and save them if they fell. But don’t jump, seriously.
When the land that has Wellington on it comes into view, the getting-off countdown begins. We will have forgotten what deck our car is on and go by memory or the smell of the ripe sheep truck we always seem to get parked near.
There will be far fewer fluoro-vest people waving us off and often the cars almost seem to sort it out ourselves. Strangely, being late on often means getting off quickly so then we congratulate ourselves on getting it right at this end. We rattle down the gangplank on to foreign land, where the folks are odd, the customs are strange, and the grass really is greener. By O¯ taki, we have become New Zealanders and stopped wondering how they do that grass trick without irrigators.
The big trip north is on again this year and this was written before it happened. Sadly, there was a mini-coup by the two who lean toward seasickness and we are flying over the ferries to Auckland instead, then using a rental car.
It’s a shame because I had a good feeling this would be the year we’d make that early start, arrive in plenty of time, get a high lane 1 spot and only eat fruit on a fast, calm trip. But there’s always next summer.