We’ve had a wild weekend weather-wise with 140kph southerly gales and 14 metre swells in Cook Strait. Yesterday we drove down to Palliser Bay on the south coast, and were suitably impressed. Even close to shore the swells were huge and the surface of the sea was white – foamy brine as far as the eye could see.

We couldn’t drive far along Palliser Bay road – it was too dangerous and we gave up when we saw waves crashing across the road. Where we stopped there was spume everywhere and every so often chunks of it were whipped up by the howling wind and scattered everywhere. As we drove home, away from the coast, spume swirled around our car for a couple of hundred metres.

It was a great photo opportunity for both still and video, but regrettably the camera battery died before I could take a single shot. I’d taken too many kitten photos earlier in the morning. We went down again this morning with the camera fully charged, but the sea had quietened down a lot. Still very nasty, but the only photo I felt like taking was of a section of road that had debris hurled onto it.

Rocks and a tree trunk littering Palliser Bay Road this morning

It would have been great to have had a functioning camera yesterday. It would also have been great if it had been safe to have gone further along the road to where the coastline gets very rocky. It would have been doubly spectacular there.