The second day after arriving at Martin’s Bay we went down to check out the seals at Long Reef. It’s an easy 30 minute walk to get to the seals and we saw plenty of them.

You can get very close to the seals and you could easily have a ‘rock’ suddenly move on you! The smaller females make a quick exit to the sea, but the bull seals stand their ground – they’re not interested in moving for anyone.

There is a track marker beside the entrance to the colony – so trampers coming back from Big Bay can join the track from the beach. We made the mistake of taking the high tide route to Big Bay (think mud, flax and no real track) and after two hours of bashing our way through it we’d all had enough. We should have gone down to the beach and walked along it to Big Bay. We discussed going forward up along the beach, but there had been heavy rain and I was worried the McKenzie river would be flooded. There are warnings about the river in the Martin’s Bay hut, and it was certainly on my mind.

On my urging, we turned back for Martin’s Bay, as I just couldn’t face an 8 hour day after 2 hours of bush bashing. We hopped over the rocks down the beach – and it took just 40 minutes to cover the same distance it had taken 2 hours to do via the bush track. The ‘fun’ part about going this way is meeting the seals on the way back – this is quite an experience, and I certainly had the adrenaline pumping. It seemed that every 10 metres or so we had to negotiate another seal in our way. When I saw the track marker on the bush line I did a 100 metre dash – I’d had enough of the snarling. I’ve since heard a few horror stories about bites from fur seals.

The track marker at Long Reef Point – which happens to be right at the launching spot for the seals.