More Able Tasman- February 6

Wow blogging two days in a row! We're on a roll eh? Today we hiked another leg of the Abel Tasman Coastal track. We took a water taxi again, this time up to Bark Bay and walked down to Torrent Bay and taxied back out to Marahau. There was an Easerly wind this morning that made for really rough seas which meant most of the people in the water taxi got a bit of a bath. One poor lady and her little girl were drenched. We had to stop in the shelter of Adele island so the captain could drop the sides to try to keep us a bit dryer. It was too rough to stop on the open water, we would have been swamped. So after our rather rough and wet journey, the weather cleared right up, the wind died down and the sun came out in full force. It was beautiful. We got to see the amazing color of the ocean along the coast with the sun shining, every hue of green and blue and turquoise imaginable. The sand in Abel Tasman aren't white or black, they are golden colored. They are granite sand beaches from all the granite cliffs being worn away by the sea. The sand starts out black, but it has such a high iron content that due to its sea exposure it actually starts to oxidize. So essentially, they are just rusty beaches, but they're quite pretty, and the sand is soooo soft. Just south of Bark Bay, there is a swing bridge that crosses one of the lagoons we Kayaked into yesterday, so we got to see it from a different vantage point, take some photos etc. The bridge itself is kinda neat, its really narrow, only one person at a time can fit widthwise, and its max weight capacity is 5 people, so due to the Costal Tracks popularity, there was a bit of a traffic jam at the bridge. THus we didn't get all the pictures we had hoped to, but at least we got a few of us ON the bridge. That was pretty much the highlight of the hike today, the scenery was amazing, but if I start going into it in too much detail it will be like reading Lord of the RIngs... all scenery, no action. So I"ll let Miles load a few photos as they will describe it much better than I can.
Cheers for now,
Miles and Bri