Cribs & Clouds- Poolburn Dam; Part 2

 Catch-up

Continued on from Part 1

Along with peace & solitude (most of the time) Poolburn offers some spectacular Central Otago scenery which is often topped off with some fantastic cloud formations. 

Not only is the natural scenery awesome but there are also some very quaint & quirky cribs located around the reservoir. Cribs is 'lower South Island' speak for fishing huts or baches. Baches, to my overseas readers, is 'the rest of NZ' speak for holiday homes. Rustic holiday homes not those flash jobbies either. I am an avid photographer of cribs & baches and have built up quite a collection over the years. I love their weather worn character, many of them cobbled together with old & excess building supplies. Inside, old magazines & groaning bookshelves, discarded fishing tackle and collections of kiwiana kitsch banished from everyday suburbia. And all of them holding generations of memories & tall tales.

Following are a selection of photos taken during our two weeks at Poolburn.

On a very clam day the dam is a mill pond perfect for reflections and spotting those elusive jumping Brown Trout. 

If you click on this photo to enlarge you'll notice three busy men going about their fishing business (well two anyway). One of them, Danny, is an honorary Poolburn custodian. He may pop in to say hello and if you're lucky you may get invited over for a yarn & happy hour.

I have three favourite cribs & this is one of them. Actually I probably have more but these ones make great subjects. This little one is actually on an island.

The sky seems to be closing in on us with this cloud cover. Cloud like this never seems to stay around long, the sun soon burns it off if it's early morning or if appears at sunset (like this one) and it disappears overnight.

In between his fishing trips I asked David to take me in our Takacat inflatable on a tiki-tour over to the far side of the dam, up a long narrow arm that ends at Long Valley Creek (top right photo, below). It's a favourite place for fly fisherman but unless you have a boat, it's a very long walk. 

There's an abandoned house & large shed on a point at the entrance to the arm (top left & centre). I guess it will be left like that to disintegrate & slowly breakdown forever & a day. Up behind that ridge ahead of us (and believe me it's much taller than it looks) is where the LOTR film set was.  

On the way home I took a few more photos of the cribs on the east side of the dam...

...before we pulled into my newly named  'Southern Man Bay' to have lunch (check out the billboard on the front of the fishing lodge).

What a lovely little bay, there's actually a deep little bay on the other side of the crib too, check out the next photo. We sat on one of the rocky outcrops and had our lunch before heading back to the van.

   

This lovely golden hour photo of Poolburn was taken as I headed home from one of my regular sunrise vantage points further up the road. You can see the Southern Man crib and its surrounding bays in the centre of the photo. We came in from the left for lunch.

You'll have to wait for the last Poolburn blog to see some of the fabulous (if I must say so myself) sunrise & sunset shots I took but here are a few of the golden hour photos taken on my walk home. That's a small mown airstrip in front of the cribs at the back right.

This one really shows how much care should be taken to avoid the many islands & rocky points when a boatie navigates around the dam. David reported that the dam was lower than usual, the rocky tors that had sat just under the water on previous visits were more exposed on this one. 

There's still  a large section of the dam out to the right in this pano...

...including this area where we're parked. The road entrance to Poolburn is up at the top left and in the foreground it disappears over the hill and down below the dam wall and then out across the range. Did you spot 'Out There'? Click the photo to enlarge.

Here is #2 of my fav cribs. This one belongs to the Omakau Fishing Club and is most probably one of my favourites because it is very handy to where we park and I'm always passing by with my camera in hand!

It also appears in one of my iconic photos of a frozen Poolburn Dam, click the link if you'd like to read more about that visit back in 2015.

On this morning one of the occupants is fishing off the rocks in front of the crib. If you look closely you can also see another guy on the deck who also looks to be fishing for his breakfast from the comfort of his deck chair.

A perfect morning at Poolburn.

Here's a few more photos of the cribs, most of them are on our side of the dam. My third favourite crib is in the two photos on the top right. This tiny little crib ( it's actually the local station's shepherd hut) sits way up on a rocky outcrop overlooking the dam.

These ones are golden hour sunsets taken across the water from our camp site. 

Night falls on our tranquil lakeside camp site.

Between fishing expeditions- which weren't very fruitful on this visit- David set the koura pot (freshwater crayfish). There were plenty of koura caught but in the end we decided that for the amount of meat you get off them, and that's the big ones only, we had no need to dispatch them to the cooker (they taste a little sweeter than prawn but you can really only eat their tails). We just had fun catching & releasing them!

Another morning shot on my way home; this one shows me how insignificant we really are in the whole scheme of things, & especially in this beautiful Central Otago landscape (check for the van).

If you didn't know better you'd probably think this next photo was taken on the same day as the one above. It wasn't, it was two days earlier and at the other end of the day. 

When I saw those clouds forming just before sunset I raced down the road, over the fence and clambered up to a high point overlooking the dam. When I reached the top of the rocks and looked over the other side, I startled a mob of cattle below. 

They stood for a moment deciding what to do and then took off, thundering across the ground and heading for the far end, disappearing between the rocks never to be seen again. Later, as I walked back down one lonely cow came bellowing out from behind a rock stack obviously wondering where all her mates had gone. 

The sunset didn't amount to much but it was a great view of the dam from a different angle. I was also looking out for the Karearea/NZ Falcon I'd seen in this area on a previous visit. Sadly I didn't see him this visit, I suspect he would have been spooked by the LOTR Tech area which was nearby or that the wild cat we'd seen nearby had put paid to any nesting efforts and maybe it had moved on. 

And finally a few more photos of the cribs across the way.

And you got to love that morning golden hour...

To be continued...Part 3

Poolburn Paradise

Real-time

Surprise! We have internet albeit very slow to download and very painful to upload, it took me at over two hours to upload the photos for this blog post. But, who am I to complain, at least we have contact with the outside world, thanks once again to Netspeed. 

I can't altogether blame the slow internet for the lack of blog posts though, it's been that and the fact that we've been rather busy doing not much after arriving at Poolburn seven days ago. 

We left the racecourse at Omakau Sunday morning and headed off to Poolburn Dam 35kms away. This is our 4th visit to Poolburn but the first with the 5th-wheeler on the back. We were both looking forward to spending a bit of time at the dam, doing some fishing, some photographing and exploring along the Old Dunstan Road (track); joining a few more dots on the Rough Ridge plateau. 

It's 15kms of  dry clay road, with an unforgiving bedrock base, to Poolburn Dam from Moa Creek. It doesn't sound like much but it's tough going, it's a slow haul out of the Ida Valley and up into the unusual moonscape-like scenery of Rough Ridge, with it's rocky tors and dry tussock grasslands.

This time the dust was diabolical after a dry summer, and the corrugations terrible and poor David swore and cursed as we inched our way upwards and onwards.

If it had been any further he'd have turned around I'm sure, although once past the halfway mark....well, there's no point is there? I know, it doesn't look that bad does it? But believe me it's probably the worst road we've travelled with the 5th-wheeler on the back. I just thank God it was dry.

All was forgotten once we reached the dam and we'd found a good spot beside the water, where we could launch the inflatable easily enough. There are plenty of areas to park although not all are level and not all close to the water. 

We've had a steady stream of neighbours across the bay from us at the unofficial boat ramp...

...and a few crib owners about, but never more than half a dozen vehicles pass by each day.

I got very excited about sunset our first night, thinking that'll I'll see plenty of them over the week but in fact that one was probably the best of them all.

Every day bar two (today being the 2nd one) has been a stunner, perfect blue skies, warm sun but hardly any clouds to reflect the brilliant colours of a setting sun.

And sunrise the following morning has been the only decent one too.

And we've had our first frost of season, it was -2c outside and 4c inside. The diesel heater was given a good workout.

And of course a great day usually follows a frost, which makes the cold all worthwhile. David has been out fishing most days although he's sad (reluctant?) to report that the fish have headed to the depths and refused to be tempted by any number of lures or types of fishing.

Everyone else reports the same...

Although we did managed to catch some koura in the net for dinner...

While David's been fishing, I've had an awesome time exploring the rocky tors for skinks (I was hoping to find the very rare Giant &/or Otago Skinks- no luck yet). This one is still a good find though, a native McCanns skink...

I also found a number of rabbits, or to be more precise they found me. Scaring the bejesus out of me as they lept out of shady holes close by, high up in the rocky outcrops, they'd race like demented idiots down the rock faces doing death defying leaps and zig-zagging off into the sunset or 'hiding' behind rocks further down the slope.

I walked to the dam wall, exploring the tors along the way...

...chatting to these motorhomers...

...before heading up to the fenceline behind where the views from the top are magnificent. I even spotted David fishing on the far side of the dam (click photo to enlarge- you won't see David though, he's too small!)...

There's a crib hiding in amongst the rocks at the top, it's a long way from the water.  I have a feeling it might have been used when the LOTR was filmed here. Poolburn Dam was the setting for the Plains of Rohan. That link is of my blog when we visited Poolburn during winter and found the lake frozen (some awesome photos if I must say so myself!)...

The reason I came up the back way to the crib was because of a flock of merino sheep that were resting below the crib. I crept over the top and onto a rock to look down on them. They are so skittish, they usually take off as soon as they catch a sight of you. 

A couple spotted me straight away, but the game was up when David called me up on the walkie-talkie right at the crucial moment. His voice boomed out into the stillness from my backpack! Game over and they headed for the hills (or rocks as the case maybe). It wouldn't have been so bad if he was calling to report a catch, but no he was just checking in.

The greatest excitement of them all though, was a sighting of two New Zealand Falcons/Karearea; an adult and it's fledgling. They flew through our camp at head height, the juvenile chasing its parent and calling patently for some attention. The next day I saw the juvenile fly onto the rocks behind us. 

I grabbed my camera, pulled on my gumboots, scaled the fence and spent the next hour or so in the company of one amazing bird. He wasn't in the least bit fazed with my presence, he flew in low over my head, swooping from one rock to the next, changing direction and following me when I disappeared out of sight, diving down into the tussock, catching and eating lizards, perching on a rocky point scanning the countryside for many minutes while I stood below him. It was an amazing encounter and a great privilege to experience. 

 There certainly is gold at the end of the Poolburn's rainbow.