Monday, March 16, 2009

Bluff

During our weekend in Invercargill, it was sunny on Saturday night, and we decided to go to dinner in Bluff. We had eaten there before in a restaurant that overlooks the ocean. Bluff is the southeastern "corner" of the South Island, about a half hour southeast of Invercargill. The town has a few interesting buildings.


Near the restaurant is this cool sign, which we showed about 18 months ago.



The restaurant, The Drunken Sailor, has a great view.

I took the next photo from our table.

The fishing boat in the photo below had dozens of birds following it -- you can see them as white specks. Some of them were seagulls, but we could tell (using Dave's binoculars) that some of them were albatrosses, either royal albatrosses or mollymawks. Albatrosses have a distinctive hooked beak and are much bigger than seagulls. I really wished we had a zoom lens with the same view as Dave's binoculars.

In the next photo is the foot passenger ferry from Stewart Island to Bluff, which we could see in the distance from our table. Again, I wished we had a long zoom lens on our camera so we could show it in a photograph. (The two islands in the photo above and below are Dog Island, with the lighthouse on it, and Ruapuke Island behind it, 6 and 21 km away, according to the cool sign. If you go back to the photo with Dave and the binoculars, Stewart Island, 35 km away, was visible past the headland in the photo.)

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