Story about a photo I took of a boat.

I took this photo a few years ago now but it is still one of my favourite ones. I was lucky enough to live in Milford Sound, Fiordland, New Zealand for just over a decade. Its a great spot but not for everybody, 126 kilometre drive to get bread, milk, cell phone reception etc. Giant sandflies and torrential rain tend to be the final straw for most people. Anyway I could write a book about that.

On this day it was predicted to be fairly wet and windy but for about an hour it was much more intense than that. The record rainfall in milford in one 24 hour period is about two feet. Not joking. This wasn't record day but fairly close.

I was driving a 60ft tourist boat, it was the middle of the day cruise and we had about 70 passengers onboard. Before we left the harbour I sat everyone down and gave them a speech about how the boat was safe but it may seem a bit intense at some stages of the trip. Things were pretty good until we approached the narrowest part of the fjord. The anemometer (wind gauge) on most boats don't have a good range higher up because they are optimised for average conditions. The guy who built the boat I was driving was also a pilot and happened to have a spare airspeed indicator handy while he was fitting out the wheelhouse and thought it would be worth a laugh to plumb it in.

Well that gauge was showing 80 knots as I approached the start of the wind. It topped out at about 120 which made my ears pop. You really have to keep the boat heading into the wind at this stage otherwise you get turned around.

Just after we passed through the worst of it I put the boat on autopilot and ran down to the back deck to take this photo. My wife was working on the boat in the photo at the time, its called the MV Milford Wanderer, its 30m/90ft long.

I really wish I had frame the photo a touch to the left to get the waterfall in frame but...shit happens.

Let me know what you think about the photo or feel free to share any Milford experiences