Abel Tasman, day 2.

I woke this morning about five minutes before my alarm went off, listening to the waves lapping against the Cat A Rac's hull. Five minutes later, my watch and Jane both rousted me and all the others bunking in the starboard hull: we tumbled out of bed, did our minimal freshening-up and changing in the boat's head, and scarfed a quick breakfast in preparation for the day. The dinghy took us all back to the beach, again in several trips, to meet the line of bright yellow sea kayaks ranked on the sand.

After much tarrying on the beach, waiting for the guides and kayaks to be completely ready, we geared up (lifejackets, spray skirts, paddles) and paired up. Each pair got a two-man kayak; my partner, a tall, taciturn redhead named Mike, and I stuffed our things into the watertight bins between each kayak's two cockpits and got settled in the boat. The guide shoved us off the sand, we smiled for Jane's camera, and we were off!

Of course, nothing was quite smooth sailing. The first thing we noticed was that our kayak's rudder wasn't working. Yes, it had a rudder: a big, heavy two-person kayak needs one if it's to have much of a turning radius. Ours was kaput. Two guides in succession glided up beside us to lean over and tug at various fittings aft of Mike's seat; they concluded that it was either confounded by Mike's very long legs or just broken. Either way, we were going to have to steer the old-fashioned way for the rest of the day.

We managed well enough once we'd gotten the hang of it. Under an unbroken blue sky we caught up with the rest of the group, our boat knifing through the clear blue-green water. My arms burned before long with the unaccustomed exercise, but the beauty of the two-man boat is that you can rest while your partner paddles and vice versa: occasional thirty-second breaks were enough to keep me going. I'm not particularly fit, I know; Mike was probably carrying the boat. I'd like to think I was at least contributing.

The guides led our gaily-colored little flotilla around the point that shelters Anchorage and out into the open water. On such a perfect day there was precious little difference -- maybe another five centimeters to the waves' height, that's all. We cruised down the coast, back the way we came in on yesterday's water taxi. The sea was as perfectly gorgeous as it was yesterday, only now we didn't have engine noise between it and us.

We landed for lunch a few hours later, on yet another postcard beach, and perched on an old picnic table and a few driftwood logs to snarf our sand. The guides took a group photo: I hid in the back row, not terribly eager to show off the spectacle of my zip-off shorts over pulled-up thermals. Eesh.

After that it was back in the kayaks and more paddling. Around the next point, the guides stopped us to point out a pair of miniature sea caves, accessible only from the water -- arched gashes in the cliff, each big enough to fit a kayak or two. We paddled in, our exclamations of delight echoing off the granite. Backing out was a challenge -- the flotilla had congealed into an aquatic traffic jam -- but we managed it eventually.

The last leg of our journey, one headland after the sea caves, took us across a wide stretch of open shallow water to the final landing point. (These were the sand flats I'd painted a few days earlier, now submerged by high tide. In the distance, I even spotted the rock I'd sat on.) Before, our course had mostly hugged the shoreline, which had given us constant reminders of our speed. Now that we were much farther out, we had no way to judge how fast we were going or, indeed, that paddling was doing much at all. I started to tire, and fast. By the time Marahau wharf began to grow appreciably ahead of us, my arms were burning constantly and my hands felt raw, yet we'd fallen way behind all the other boats. Doggedly, we kept at it. Mike hadn't said much the whole time, so I didn't really know how he was doing and was far too awkward to ask; I didn't exactly want to let up, since he was basically carrying us already. That last kilometer was not fun.

Finally, though, the water under us grew shallow enough to see the bottom, then shallow enough to touch a paddle to the bottom; then we were pulling the boat up on the Marahau beach. I undid my spray skirt, shook excess water off my coat, grabbed my stuff from the middle compartment, and slogged up the sand to splat bonelessly on a driftwood log. When our party began filtering towards the vans ten minutes later, it took me a minute or two to follow.

And that was it. The Abel Tasman trip had ended. It was definitely worth the time and money: I saw a drop-dead gorgeous part of New Zealand, by land and sea, in ways I wouldn't have done on my own. Sure, I was tired and damp by the end of it; but part of the wet was my own fault, and part of it was sheer adventure. What's a seagoing trip without salt water?