Through the forties to Fiordland...

We'd first glimpsed a sight of land around two in the afternoon when it was still over forty miles away. The sky cleared more comprehensively around six eliciting exclamations from us both. I don't know what I'd expected but the sight surpassed anything we'd imagined.

As darkness fell we still had at least fifteen miles to go. Duncan shivered with excitement,

'a clear night, almost full moon... it'll be amazing!'

I love night time arrivals too but truth be told only because of the reflected glow of Duncan's confidence and excitement. Seeing in the dark in unfamiliar teritory is not my forte.

As we approached, the wall of towering rock disclosed ridges and fissures. A silvery stripe of waterfall here, then there; 'they're everywhere!' The surf crashed on the rocks around the point and across Anita's bay. We rolled on in.

Navigation wasn't hard once we started to benefit from the shelter of the imposing granite.  The crags tumble down from thousands of metres above the mast to hundreds of metres below the keel here, the igneous formations gorged out by glaciers.

We spied the bay we'd planned to check first; it was vast, calm and in that silvery half light breathtakingly beautiful. We slept soundly for the rest of the night and awoke to blissfull flat calm, then had a gentle sail in to the deep harbour, a far cry from the previous few days.