After a brief but successful visit to the Bounty Islands, our expedition team continued their journey to the ultimate destination: the Antipodes Island group. This marked the fourth visit of our five-year project, so the first glimpse of the islands wrapped in mist was a familiar one. What was also familiar – and frustrating –...
This year’s subantarctic expedition is under way! On the 25th our gear passed biosecurity inspection at the Invercargill quarantine store before we headed to Bluff to load Evohe for departure. By late afternoon we were under way, pushing east along the Southland coast. The following two days were spent at sea in slow, often uncomfortable...
We’re hosting a special two-night voyage into Patea / Doubtful Sound at the height of tawaki (Fiordland penguin) season – a rare chance to experience one of Aotearoa’s wildest fiords and meet one of its most charismatic (and elusive) birds. The trip runs Friday, 31 Oct – Sunday, 2 Nov. On board, you’ll settle into...
The first major discovery from Rowley Taylor’s cabinet: a VHS tape containing 16mm footage from the 1950 expedition to the Antipodes and Bounty Islands! These days, finding a VHS tape usually means stumbling across some grainy recordings of 1980s TV shows. But tucked away in one of the cabinet drawers was a tape labelled “Alert...
Last weekend, Thomas travelled from Dunedin to Charleston on the West Coast to follow up on a remarkable lead. Back in 2023, Shelley Taylor – daughter of subantarctic research pioneer Rowley Taylor – had mentioned that she still had a filing cabinet “full of picture slides, photos, and research notes on the subantarctic islands” sitting...
After another expedition to the sub-antarctic Bounty and Antipodes Islands came to a close in late December 2024, the team dove head first into reporting season. And as with the previous expedition, the amount of new information gathered was once again massive so that the resulting report approached the dimensions of a novella. There is...
