Noon Report:

• Position: S 41° 16.14′, E 174° 47.23′
• Speed: Moored
• Course: Moored

First, I have added one more video to the WC044 – Tauranga post. This is a ‘stick dance’ (I don’t know what they really call it but you’ll get the picture) performed by the high school team. Check it out – it’s pretty cool.

Second, the wind on deck this morning was amazing. It’s a good thing I’m so heavy or I would have blown away. If it continues to be this bad I’ll have to work on my daily intake of sticky buns and ice cream. But I did get a pretty good sunrise photo:

While I was walking the pilot boat pulled alongside and our Wellington pilot boarded to bring us into port.

Our first excursion this morning was a scenic (bus) tour of the city. We saw buildings:

We saw street art:

In the Botanical gardens we visited the Rose Garden”

Then it was time for lunch.

The afternoon saw us on a tour called “Lord of the Rings Experience”. Our bus took us around the bay to the WETA complex where we were given a guided tour of their processes and some of the props that you’ve seen in Lord of the Rings, Avatar, King Kong, and several other great movies. Their processes include everything from design and modeling (and sometimes engineering), to injection molding of plastics (for guns and swords) and silicon (for masks and prosthetic limbs and such), to computer-driven milling and 3-D printing, to actual production work (They have the largest blue-screen in the southern hemisphere.), to full-on digital production. One of the displays we saw was a gorilla that was never intended to be shown on screen. Instead it was used to model how wind effects the fur (inserted hair follicle by hair follicle) so that the digital creators could make their blue-screen animal even more lifelike. We also got to handle plastic and aluminum swords, weighted plastic rifles and a Tommy-Gun that was scarily accurate, fake and real chain mail (In LOTR Viggo Mortinson insisted on wearing real-and it’s heavy-chain mail. They let him wear that-except for the scene where he’s in a boat.), plastic helmets from World of Warcraft, hand-tooled leather greaves and such.

Sadly they didn’t allow photography in the actual display area (The items aren’t actually owned by WETA and many of the items are copyrighted by their actual owners) but they did let us shoot in the gift ship area:

Following this tour we headed up Mt. Victoria to check out some of the actual filming locations.

I mentioned that these scenes were shot at night. In addition to the cars, the ‘mist’ was produced by smoke machines. When people around saw smoke coming from these woods in the middle of the night they called the fire brigade, who showed up to find out what was going on – the filming company was fined. Word got back to the counsel that people were filming up on Mt. Victoria without a permit and again, fines were levied.

While we’re talking about different-sized doubles to force perspective, a normal person next to Paul Randall will look like a Hobbit standing next to Sir Ian.

One other thing we found up on the mountain:

We were delivered back to the ship 1/2 hour after ‘back on board’ time. And we weren’t the last excursion back.

But shortly after they arrived we pulled away and headed out into the Cook Strait. As we were doing that we were attending a talk:

Pelorus Jack was a porpoise (there’s discussion about what kind) who guided ships thru the narrow and treacherous passage in the Cook Strait for over 24 years in the late 1800s and early 1900s. It was a fascinating story.

Then it was dinner and BBB (13/26 but 3rd place).

Along the way we got a couple of photos of the sunset.

Cheryl’s factoids:

• Wellington is the southernmost capital of a country in the ENTIRE WORLD! Since the southern island is a little offset west of the northern island, if you sailed straight south from Wellington the next land you hit is Antarctica. Since the wind is squeezed between the two islands through Cook’s Strait (which is where Wellington is located) the wind here is very strong!