A magical Southern Ocean sail to Stewart Island
Preservation to Rakiura
A Southern Ocean Day
Foveaux Strait · Late March 2026 · 46°S
We were away from Preservation Inlet at five in the morning, the anchor up in the dark with a westerly already building and the sky just beginning to lighten over the mountains behind us. The plan was straightforward: run east along the bottom of the South Island, pass the Solander Islands, clear Slope Point, thread the Muttonbird Islands, and be anchored off Stewart Island before sunset. Long summer days make this achievable. A moderate westerly made it enjoyable.
The Gennaker — and Mr Sleepy
The angle and the breeze were right and we hoisted the gennaker for the first time on the voyage. It went up cleanly, filled immediately, and Matariki III accelerated into easy, purposeful sailing — the Southern Ocean stretching ahead, the westerly on the quarter, and for a while nobody needed to do anything except watch the horizon and enjoy the ride.
This was also the point at which Bruce assumed his customary underway position. Bruce is a remarkable cook, an exceptional shipmate, and — at sea in a seaway — a man who experiences what he would describe as fatigue and what the rest of the crew would describe as a strategic commitment to horizontal surfaces. His nickname is Mr Sleepy. It is well earned.
Greg, who documents everything, took the photograph. After sharing on the group chat, Brendan— in a moment of creative mischief that can only be properly appreciated by people who know Bruce — enhanced it with an AI image and sent it back to the group chat. Bruce took it with the good grace of a man who has been teased before and will be teased again, and who knows that the best response is to say nothing and wait for dinner, at which point all debts are settled.
The Solander Islands — A Volcano Where It Shouldn't Be
The Solander Islands appeared off the port bow in the mid-morning — two dark humps rising unexpectedly from a sea that has no business producing volcanic islands at this latitude. And that is precisely what they are: the eroded remnants of a submarine volcano, pushed up through the seabed by the same tectonic processes that built the Southern Alps, but doing so here, in open ocean, 55 kilometres south of the Fiordland coast, in a location that looks geologically improbable until you know the story.
The Solanders are the eroded surface expression of a Miocene-age volcano — formed roughly 10 to 25 million years ago — that has been sitting in the Southern Ocean being ground down by weather and wave ever since. The main island, Big Solander (Hautere), rises to about 330 metres from a base that sits in 200 metres of water. They lie on the boundary zone between the Australian and Pacific tectonic plates — the reason New Zealand has volcanoes at all — but finding one this far south, this isolated, surrounded by open ocean, is genuinely unexpected even knowing the mechanism.
Cook named them in 1770 after Daniel Solander, the Swedish naturalist aboard the first voyage, noting them on the chart but not landing. They remained largely unstudied until the 20th century, when their significance as seabird habitat became clear. The islands have never had a permanent land predator population — the storm-washed terrain and isolation make establishment impossible — which is why their bird colonies have remained intact across millennia. Landing without a DOC permit is now prohibited.
Up close — as close as a prudent skipper will take a 68-foot yacht in a moderate westerly — the islands are extraordinary. Every slope is occupied. The air above them is white with circling birds, column after column rising off the cliff faces and dispersing across the sky. The noise carries across the water before you can distinguish species. And everywhere you look there are albatross — not the occasional bird you see on a passage, but hundreds of them, working the updrafts above the volcanic cliffs in a continuous, effortless display.
Albatross
The albatross were with us from Preservation Inlet onwards, and became extraordinary at the Solanders. Hundreds of them — banking, gliding, skimming the surface, disappearing over wave crests and reappearing on the other side having covered ground that cost us effort and concentration with nothing more than a slight adjustment of one wing. An albatross in a Southern Ocean swell is operating at the absolute peak of what natural selection produces for long-range sustained flight: dynamic soaring, extracting energy from the gradient between fast upper wind and slower surface air, travelling over 1,000 kilometres in a day without beating its wings.
The Muttonbird Islands — Tītī Islands
The chart showed a passage through the Tītī Islands that looked, on paper, like it required care. In practice it required considerably more than that — the gap between the islands was substantially narrower than the chart had suggested, with perhaps 20 metres of clear water on each side as we threaded through. The westerly was still on our quarter, the rocks were very close, and the birds on them were close enough to count. It concentrated the mind. We came through without incident, which is the correct outcome, and nobody mentioned how tight it had been until we were well clear.
The sooty shearwater — tītī — is one of the most abundant seabirds on earth, with a global population estimated at over 20 million birds. They breed in burrows on the Tītī Islands and the satellite islands around Rakiura, returning each spring from migrations that take them to the sub-Arctic Pacific before swinging south again on the prevailing winds. The round trip can exceed 70,000 kilometres — one of the longest annual migrations of any animal on earth.
The islands are the kaitiakitanga — guardianship — of Rakiura Māori, who have harvested tītī chicks under a regulated customary system for at least 700 years. The harvest runs from mid-April to mid-May, when the chicks are at peak weight before fledging. Harvesting rights are inherited, not transferable, and each family returns year after year to the same islands their ancestors worked. The tītī are preserved in their own fat — a traditional preparation that Pākehā settlers called "muttonbirding" and which remains a taonga species of profound cultural significance to Rakiura Māori today.
This is one of the oldest continuously practised forms of wildlife management in New Zealand, predating European settlement by five centuries. DOC manages the harvest in partnership with the traditional owners, with annual population monitoring to ensure sustainability. The system has worked for 700 years. It continues to work.
The Southernmost Tip
Slope Point passed to port in the early afternoon — the southernmost tip of the South Island, and commonly regarded as the southernmost point of mainland New Zealand, which by convention includes the country's three main islands: the North Island, the South Island, and Stewart Island. Slope Point sits at 46°40' south. It is a low headland, unremarkable to look at, distinguished only by its latitude and what lies beyond it: Foveaux Strait, Stewart Island, and then the long uninterrupted run south to Antarctica. It went past without ceremony. These things usually do.
Rakiura
Stewart Island appeared in the late afternoon — the distinctive ridgeline rising above the Foveaux chop, dark and substantial. New Zealand's third island: 85% national park, population around 400, accessible only by ferry or light aircraft from the mainland. Rakiura — "glowing skies" — a reference to both the extraordinary sunsets and the aurora australis that appears here on clear nights, this being far enough south that the southern lights are regular rather than rare.
We were anchored before sunset, the gennaker down and stowed, the passage logged. A good day's sailing — a 5am start, a moderate westerly, a gennaker that performed beautifully, a volcanic island covered in hundreds of albatross, a threading passage through the Muttonbirds with about 20 metres to spare on each side, and a sleepy cook who provided the light entertainment. Exactly the kind of day that belongs on a boat at the bottom of New Zealand in late summer.