Continuing on with our Northland travels from before Covid. I thought I'd better finish soon as we're now heading back to the North Island for a few months! And I'm afraid it's going to be a bit of a gannet photo fest.
Our last stop before heading into Auckland was at the Muriwai Beach Motor Camp. I wanted to check out the gannet colony and also try for some west coast sunset shots.
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| Muriwai Beach |
The gannet chicks were in various stages of development; tiny bald youngsters, big fluffy white chicks & motley coloured juveniles testing the limits of their nest boundaries & flapping to strengthen their wings
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| A tender moment with a parent |
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| Time to take 40 winks |
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| Contemplating life in the colony |
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| There's not a spare piece of real estate left on all available rock stacks & plateaus |
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| Juveniles watch on as an adult displays |
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| "You keep off my patch you here?" |
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| Can you see the lookout at the top? there are areas you can watch the gannets from |
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| Muriwai Beach |
I managed to capture the sun setting on the first night...
...and also had some great light on the way home.
But the next evening it was very unsettled and then a bank of cloud rolled in. I still found some great subjects to photograph; fisher people & other photographers.
When I got back to camp, David was having happy hour with our neighbours who were visiting from the Netherlands and travelling around the North Island in a motorhome.
He had a surprise for me, they had offered us two of their tickets for the open day at Gibbs Sculpture Farm which wasn't too far back up the road, you'll remember we passed it on the road to Muriwai. They'd bought four tickets for two different days so they had options if the weather wasn't great. They'd decided to go the next day so we could visit the following day.
David decided he wouldn't go so they kept that ticket to pass onto someone else. There was no way I wasn't going! I couldn't wait...
