Lost in translation

After a night in an obscenely large unit of a motel in Invercargill – I had a two floor unit with four beds for myself (the requirement for each member of the film crew to have his own unit is something that never ceases to amaze me) – our troupe drove down to Bluff where we got on board the 9.30am ferry to Stewart Island.

We arrived in Oban, the main settlement on the island, a mere hour later. We were just in time for the rain to set in which made transferring the equipment which had been shipped over in seven large bins (in other words: loads and loads of gear) a real joy.

Luke Simeon, a bearded guy with a dark complexion and green eyes, waited for us with a flat bed truck and helped shuttling the massive amount of gear to the hotel. Luke is a commercial Paua diver and crayfisherman. His fishing boat Stingray will be our floating base and has ample room to store all the diving equipment and filming gear. His fishing buddy Morgan will be acting skipper on Luke’s boat given that Luke potentially will spent considerable amount of time in the water with the two camera men.

In theory that would sum up the day adequately, if it wasn’t for what came out during the dinner I had with the crew at the hotel restaurant.

Now, one thing that I feel was a bit of an issue these last days, was that I spent hardly any time with the guys outside after our daily work in the field. Since the return of the film crew, I had hardly spent time with them outside the field. The days were too long and we always left early in the morning and returned late at night. So we had pretty little time to a chat over breakfast or dinner about what was going on and how we would continue the work.

So in a sense here on Stewart Island we had the first evening the team spent together since the crew returned from Japan. Finally some time to catch up on the things that happened in the past week and which are planned for the next few days.

Just to avoid confusion from here on: we have finally found a solution for our double Ida-san problem (i.e. the director vs the cameraman). We call Ida-san (the cameraman) by his first name, which makes him Haruki-san.

Anyhow, there we were having the first proper dinner together and Haruki-san asked me how deep Tawaki would dive (Sam translated.)

‘We don’t really know yet, but we will find out next year, when we will have dive loggers’, I replied.

Haruki-san raised his eyebrows. “But you have devices on the birds. I saw it.”

“Yes”, I replied. “But this year we have only GPS loggera available that do not record dive depths. We got the last logger back a couple of weeks… hang on… you saw what?!?”

“When I was filming in the forest. A bird with a logger on the back came walking up the path. I filmed it so we can show you.”

My jaw hit the table in astonishment. He had seen the final missing logger bird! He had even filmed it for me!! And I only find out about it by accident days later when we are on Stewart Island??? I turned to Sam.

“Oh, sorry, I forgot to tell Haruki-san about the logger. So he didn’t know what to do”, Sam apologised who I had instructed to brief all the team members about our final logger bird up on Hilltop. They were to give me a call the moment they saw the bird.

Guess my instructions got lost in translation. Doh!

Well, opportunity lost. At least I know what to do when we get back to Haast – sit in the forest to catch our last missing logger bird.