Around New Zealand The right moment

The peaceful natural beauty of Wainui Inlet has Fergus Blakiston waxing lyrical

‘Caught up in another dream, drifting on a blue ocean … ’ — Gerry Rafferty, The Right Moment

At dawn I am standing on a new land. It is low tide and in the small dark hours before the arrival of the new day, the sea has withdrawn from Wainui Inlet and created the sandy islet upon which I stand. A tiny, gentle squall of warm rain blows across Golden Bay. Cat’s paw ripples mark its progress across the water and I feel it buffet me as it strikes my island. The offing is empty save for a few tawdry gulls pecking at a halfsubmerged sandbar further offshore. Out on the horizon, the sea and the sky are welded together in a seamless joint of blue and grey.

A landscape of golden sandflats stretch away behind me, curving around a low point upon which stands a single kanuka tree. The ocean has sculpted the sand with stripes and hollows, rills and fissures, hummocks and crenulations. With each tide the moving water brings subtle changes to the inlet and the shallow, muddy estuary behind it. It is a place of constant movement and change. Even now, the tide has turned and my tiny sand country is growing smaller. I turn my back on the ocean and wade back towards terra firma.

The Wainui Inlet cuts a deep notch into the hills on the eastern edge of Golden Bay. The ocean wraps itself around a rocky headland that guards the outer edge of the inlet, and slides up on to a long strip of low dunes covered with sedges and gorse. Thick, coastal rainforest cloaks the spurs and valleys running down to the water’s edge from the skyline ridge that rises steeply from the inlet’s eastern shore.

Our home for the week is a small, rented cottage overlooking the mouth of the inlet. It is a simple place: a few bedrooms, a kitchen, a living room opening to a concrete patio and a lawn running down towards the ocean. There are kayaks behind a shed out back and a lemon tree hung to breaking with bright yellow fruit. It is a bach in the true New Zealand sense: nothing fancy but perfect for bare feet, sandy towels and eating outdoors.

When you arrange your day by the tides, it is all about timing. You have to wait for the right moment. By midday, the ocean has once again seeped into the inlet, filling its nooks and crannies; swirling into its secret places; hiding its islets and sandbars beneath a shallow skin of water. I launch a kayak and paddle out past the rocky western pinnacles.

The boulders and outcrops, so recently part of a sandy beach, are now jagged islets and black, submerged reefs. I paddle west, hugging the land like an explorer charting an hitherto unexplored coastline. In some of the coves, the ocean has piled up stacks of sun-bleached driftwood. The tangled heaps are the skeletons of forests, washed down from hidden mountain ranges and cast up on this distant shore. I think of James Reeves’ The Sea: “And ‘Bones, bones, bones, bones!’ The giant sea-dog moans, Licking his greasy paws.” At dawn the next day I am paddling on an ocean of liquid glass. Beneath my kayak, the waters of Golden Bay lie in a flat plane stretched out to the horizon. The gentlest of swells raises and lowers me as if some giant slumbering sea creature is breathing in the depths. The vast dome of the sky glows pink and mauve as the rising sun clears the hazy, jumbled skyline of Abel Tasman National Park. The noise of cicadas, echoing across the water from the shore, sounds like steam escaping from the boiler of a long-gone coastal freighter.

I switch on my phone. A couple of text messages come through. I update my Facebook page with a photo of my feet in the yellow plastic bow