Photo Galleries

Doubtful Sound

April 2023

We took an overnight cruise in Doubtful Sound, a 25-mile-long fjord in Fiordland National Park on the South Island

Our first view of Doubtful Sound on a rainy bus ride over the Wilmot Pass

Our ship, the Fiordland Navigator, which sleeps 72 people

Fjords are U-shaped valleys carved by glaciers that meet the ocean and fill with seawater

Cruising as the rain stops and the sky starts to clear

Chris looking with binoculars at one of the many waterfalls swelled by the recent rains

Melissa took 600 photos during the cruise (these are the best ones)

In the late afternoon, we got to go out in kayaks or 18-person motor boats for a closer look at the mountains

A rainbow over our ship, as seen from one of the motor boats

The mountains around Doubtful Sound, which are hard to reach by land, are covered in thick forest

Another, bigger rainbow over the fjord

Although the mountains on the sides of the fjord are steep and jagged, the islands were carved down by glaciers passing over them

Seals sunning themselves on rocks where the fjord meets the Tasman Sea

A young seal

Waves crashing on rocks at the mouth of the fjord

The skipper put up one of the ship's sails for stability in the swells on the Tasman Sea

Looking back up Doubtful Sound, which Captian Cook named in 1770 because he doubted that his ship would get the right winds to sail back out if it entered the sound

As night fell, we headed back into Doubtful Sound to spend the night in a sheltered arm of the fjord

Snow on the tops of the highest mountains

The next morning a small pod of bottlenose dolphins swam next to our ship, surfing our wake

The rising sun hits the mountain tops next to the fjord

We finished the cruise where we began, at the end of the fjord in Deep Cove, where some smaller boats were moored