The Tuia Mātauranga Pōkai Whenua GeoTour follows the footsteps of early explorers of Aotearoa New Zealand taking you to places where leaders of the past searched for food, resources and ways to adapt and survive in this new land.
Use the Pōkai Whenua GeoTour as your classroom to explore the stories of the past, in the present, to preserve what is unique in Aotearoa New Zealand for the future.
Collect the codewords to get the Geocoin puzzle pieces.
To be able to complete this GeoTour and receive your special Geocoin collectable, remember to take a note of the codeword placed in the cache. This will need to be recorded in your passport which can be downloaded here.
63 of the 150 Pōkai Whenua GeoTour caches will contain a randomly placed special FTF token (a replica of the Tuia Mātauranga GeoTour commemorative coin). This is yours to keep! If you find more than one, you might consider leaving it for the next person who finds the cache.
Kai Moana - Stewart Island fishing
Māori, oldest known settlers reaped the benefits of a coastal and island life.
Kai moana – various seafoods available to harvest in the sea and Foveaux Strait provide a bountiful food basket around the islands and along the southern coast.
As noted in another cache, Ruapuke was a southern chiefly stronghold, and one can imagine the variety of abundant seafood and sea around the island as protection would have helped to maintain that.
There is a long history of Māori habitation, with excavations showing they lived there as early as the 13thcentury in the moa-hunting period. Few made Stewart Island their permanent home, other than when it was a refuge for fleeing war. Waitaha iwi were the first visitors. Some of the Tītī Islands were named by them. Ngāti Mamoe followed in large numbers, then Ngāi Tahu.
Tītī were a major attraction: a source of food and a trading commodity with others.
Stewart Island also has bountiful stories of sealers and whalers, and yet they actually seem to be brief moments in history, when you look at the documented time they occurred.
Sealers
European sealers arrived about 1792 and for about twenty years they sealed for skins, and later for oil too.
In the 1820s, there was a revival of sealing, with most voyages focussed on Stewart Island and Foveaux Strait. Skins and oil were frequent cargoes to Great Britain, and in quite decent quantities too. This lasted for about five years.
There was a sealers’ settlement for a couple of years on Codfish Island, and ship-based sealing used the northern shores of Stewart Island for shore-based activity (such as the drying of skins). European sealers, and those who settled in the area often took a Māori wife.
After that sealing continued on a smaller scale, until it was made illegal in 1895.
Whaling
In the 1920’s a Norwegian whaling company had a wintering base in Paterson Inlet. The boats would be repaired before the next season in the Southern Ocean.
Salmon farming
In 1978, king salmon farming was started in Big Glory Bay, and continues to this day. A successful operation, they are looking at where else they could add a farm to expand to. There is also mussel farming in Big Glory Bay.
Paua (abalone)
Paua is well known around Stewart Island and across on the southern coast at Colac Bay, and off Fiordland.
Most recently, Gordon Ramsay flew in to try his hand at cooking paua and other Stewart Island delicacies. I’m pretty sure the local lass taught him a thing or two too.
The New Zealand Abalone Company intends to re-grow a land-based aquaculture farm. The facility is to be at Ocean Beach, Bluff, and will be based on stock and seaweed harvested around Stewart Island.
Stewart Island and Fouveaux Strait are currently known for blue cod, oysters, and paua. Commercial and recreational fishers seek all these delicacies.
You may have come past many fishing boats in the bay at Oban, or they may be out working.
There is a wharf across the bay from the cache location, sheds and much fishing equipment. We saw cage nets when we were there scoping out where to place a cache.
Near the cache location is plenty of beach, around the bay. Along the bay is a picnic table, and minimal amenities – basically everything you might need for morning tea, or a picnic on a nice day, at Horseshoe Bay.
In the centre of the horseshoe, between the high tide line and the road, is a prominent clump of rocks. The cache is level with the road, as opposed to being at sand level, or on top of the rock.
You might get here many ways, walk, electric bicycle, horse, kayak, car, bus or taxi. Very much accessible, but a little bit of effort required to get there, like so many parts of Stewart Island.
Slightly more than a park'n'grab, we would be surprised if you don’t also stop to take a photo, or walk along the sand. There are also nearby toilets and picnic tables.
Cache is a camo-Sistema 200ml snack-box, placed at the base of tree.
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