We started the day today at Cooks beach, a historic location where Captain James Cook first landed in New Zealand back in the 1700s in one of the great wooden exploration ships of that era.
Today, we will be crossing Mercury Bay by plastic, the modern technology of this era.
Our voyage across Mercury Bay will take us past Shakespeare Rock, named because Cook’s party thought it looked like the famous playwright whom I’m surmising that he knew personally.
The entire Backroads group forms a modern day plastic raft.
After a goodly amount of paddling, we too landed at Flaxmill Bay.
Here, I am hiding in the Mangrove Trees imagining I was waiting for James Cook to land and going pee.
Mercury Bay is named for the planet Mercury transit that the Cook party measured and used to calculate the first accurate diameter of the earth. You can read more about that here.
On the way back from the beach we stoped at a local winery to prepare for our afternoon activities!
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