KEY POINTS:
Just because you can scoot over Cook Strait in three hours while sipping lattes, it doesn't take away the fact that this is one of the most dangerous and deadly stretches of water on the planet.
There are two exceptional reasons for this. First, when it's high tide on one side of Cook Strait, it's near low tide on the other, creating runaway currents as the Pacific and the Tasman Sea begrudgingly squeeze through this 22km-wide plug.
Secondly, being the only breach in a chain of mountains stretching 800km south and 500km north, it sucks wind in at breathtaking speeds. It is, geographically speaking, New Zealand's toothless gap.
This makes crossing Cook Strait a dicey business, and while it's had enough good days to dazzle thousands of daily travellers, it's also had enough bad days to claim at least 60 ships and 220 lives.
With a generous sun and no wind, passengers line the outside decks as we curve away from shore, taking photos of each other against Wellington's skyline.
But before we leave the harbour, we pass the site of the best-known maritime disaster in living memory. On 10 April, 1968, a southerly moving tropical cyclone met a northerly moving front, generating wind gusts of an unimaginable 230km/h in Cook Strait (120km/h winds are enough to lift house roofs and uproot trees). The previous night, a ferry departed Lyttelton for Wellington with 734 people on board.
Despite this storm, it was on time and on course but, opposite Barrett Reef in the middle of Wellington Harbour entrance, there was an obvious problem. Eyewitness, Stuart Young of Breaker Bay, remembers: "It was 6.20am. I called my wife Jenny from bed, saying 'Come see, the Wahine is the wrong way round!' " The ship became disabled and the wind, which Young says "was literally picking up the surface of the sea to a height of at least 100m", blew the Wahine on to Barrett Reef. It capsized seven hours later and in the subsequent melee, 51 people lost their lives.
Winds at Wellington Harbour's entrance also created bedlam for yachts in a round-the-world race in 2001. In the 37 days and 11,000km since Buenos Aires, one sailor said: "We've had a couple of major storms during the Southern Ocean but nothing of the intensity of that."
And as we leave the tempestuous entrance to Wellington Harbour, we enter the throat of Cook Strait, which is where the real winds live. At The Brothers Islands lighthouse, one of six in Cook Strait, the winds are so threatening that they filled the space between the lighthouse's weatherboard exterior and inner-walls with broken rock. .
Meanwhile, with little more than a lazy breeze today, our hopes of seeing New Zealand's largest seabird on the wing are dismal. Albatross avoid land except for breeding, preferring the winds of the Southern Ocean and, funnily enough, Cook Strait. They can be a welcome distraction in the gallop across the Strait but they're nowhere to be seen today.
As expected, our ship enters Tory Channel without a hitch and continues our westward journey (the voyage is ultimately westward as Picton is a little more than one kilometre south of Wellington's ferry terminal).
We slide by waterside homes tucked into their own cove that can only be accessed by boat. Ultimately, this five-storey-high ferry bears down on Picton, a town seemingly with more boats than baches. Today, driving our car off the ferry feels rougher than the crossing. But as any sailor knows, Cook Strait may not be so benevolent tomorrow.
COOK STRAIT
Two companies, Bluebridge and Interislander, offer about four return sailings daily across Cook Strait with a variety of fares.
www.bluebridge.co.nz
www.interislander.co.nz
