Picton - Interislander Adventures

After pancakes and sandwiches for breakfast we walk 50m from the Campsite down to Whites Bay beach to take one last bath in the sea. At 13:11 Pascal gets the following Email from Interislander:

“Kia ora,
The Kaiarahi has developed an engineering issue and we have made the call for safety reasons to take it out of service for the next few days while we complete repairs. We have no space to move your booking and unfortunately, we will have to cancel and refund your fare. We apologise for the disruption to your travel plans. Ngā mihi nui
Your Interislander Crew”

This leaves us with a huge issue because we now have no fare back to the North Island where we need to handover Fantail on the 23rd to Jill (next customer booking on 25th) AND to catch our flight to Papeete (Tahiti) on Feb 28th! We try to Call the hotline but there is no response at all.

At 13:50 we take Fantail and start to drive to Picton (through Rarangi and then on HW1). At 14:25 we arrive at Interislander Terminal to get Waitlisted. We do not get a concrete date but the service staff tell us that there’s a small chance to get on the ferry next day at noon. To be sure we exhaust all options we walk over to Bluebridge Terminal but they also have a broken down ship and there is even more chaos. A handwritten sign outside reads: “Sorry no new bookings. Standby only available for those on our cancelled sailings. We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused. Sincerely the Bluebridge Team”. Quite a bit dejected we decide that it makes not much sense to stay longer by the port. We check-in at Tasman Holiday Park (a very nice campsite with a pool!) where we want to spend the night and inform Jill about our situation.

As agreed on the phone with Jill we plan to drive back to the Interislander Terminal the next morning to insist we sail with one of the two vessels planned for 22nd.
Before going to bed Pascal finalizes Julia’s Birthday Video to have it ready for submission. Czytaj więcej