Quail Island

2 02 2011

Quail Island is situated in the middle of the bay outside Lyttelton and is surrounded by the Port Hills which are the remains of a volcano that erupted some 9-11 million years ago. I won’t give more away as that would spoil the fun for those doing the earthcache Quail Island’s Rocky Past. One of the things I saw whilst waitng for the ferry to return was this fantastic basalt column.

Basalt column

As part of my hunt for all the D/T combinations I had a D2.5/T4.5 cache just a 15 minute ferry trip and a half hour walk away. The last couple of hundred meters were down a steep hill to the shore. The interesting thing about this cache was it’s location just a few tens of meters away from several shipwrecks. At low tide the wrecks are exposed so I had to save my trip to the island until now so that low tide coincided with my 2 hour visit.
The cache A ships grave yard is aptly named as there are no less than eight wrecks on the shore. For some reason disused boats were beached here between 1902 and 1951.