Friday 4th June
We got up to much better weather than that of the night before; the sun was out and the rain had disappeared. The other guys in the hut all left before we were ready, but we made it out by 09.30 and headed off on what we had expected to be a much easier days trek; we had anticipated that it would take three hours – plus extra time for stoppages – to get to our destination for the night at Anchorage Huts. So, we set off in a reasonably good mood.
Unfortunately, the weather took a turn for the worse not much longer after we had left, and we walked in the rain and up another steep incline before we got to Torrent Bay at about 13.00. We had the option of waiting for another hour to cross the bay at low tide, but we didn't fancy standing about in the cold and getting wet, so we once again took the high tide route towards Anchorage. It turned out to be a decent walk, about an hour longer than the low tide option that we might have taken. Again, we had a few decent inclines and it made us tired, but we just kept our heads down and surged on. It wasn't a huge amount of fun, and even our good quality waterproof gear wasn't enough to keep the rain out.
The enjoyable three hour stroll that we had expected earlier in the day had turned into a more laborious task of about six hours, and we finally got to the Anchorage Huts at 15.30. We walked into the warmth of the hut to find eight other people sitting about, trying to dry out; we were clearly not the only ones to have been caught out in the rain.
By this stage, we were absolutely starving, and we put away a fair amount of our food (it's surprising just how tasty a simple can of tuna can be after a long day of hiking). There wasn't much else to do in the huts than to try and dry out some clothes, get warm and chat to some of the other guys. I wasn't in the mood to do a whole lot of talking but Danika struck up a conversation with two Czech guys. The rest of us just whiled away the hours until it came time to go to bed. People gradually started to turn in around 19.00.
I lay down on my mattress at about 20.30. Although there were two rooms with bunks allocated to trekkers, all of us decided to lay out mattresses in the kitchen area where the stove was, to try and keep as warm as possible. However, the sleeping bag that I had hired from the camping store in Nelson was designed to withstand temperatures of -7 degrees, so the heat of the kitchen stove that had been on for most of the day and continued to burn proved to be stifling, so much so that I had to take my bag and sleep in the much cooler temperature of the attached rooms.
