After returning from Furneaux to Burneys beach mooring, we enjoyed a seafood dinner.Saturday, we did a few tidy up jobs with the traps and then returned to Mana on Sunday morning which completed the trip.
The last trip of the year was primarily for tracking tunnel work, but we were still having gas leakage issues, so this trip turned into tracking tunnel and a recheck of all the A24’s after one month deployment.
The Wednesday weather window progressively disappeared as departure time arrived. Forecast showed 30 kts southeast close to the other side and no opportunity for delay so we decided to go and have a look. It wasn’t ideal with 27 - 33kts from the south end of mana but no swell and 1 -1.5M of chop and the occasional breaker.
Once you go out to have a look you don’t often turn back so after an hour or so we got into Queen Charlotte sound on dusk, getting to the mooring just on dark and it was raining. Bruce had come out from Picton and was at the club mooring, so we grabbed Daves one rather than rafting up in the wet. It rained quite a bit overnight and till about 11am in the morning so we had a leisurely start. Organized the groups and the various activities, got the new cameras ready for deployment and then shifted the boats over to Pickersgill moorings at the same time as a northerly front came through recording 45kts at theBrothers. Ted arrived just before the northerly after battling similar southerly conditions that we had. Another very short wind direction change.
The forecast was for rain in the afternoon but that did not eventuate and the conditions on the Island had not suffered from the previous nights rain so we got on with the job with some of the crews having had only a little experience on the tracks they were servicing there was the obligatory stories of being temporarily lost or having to back track to check a trap, two or three traps back because?? By that night all the cameras and tracking tunnel cards were out and we had checked quite a few of the A24’s and rebaited all the DOC 200’s. There was a concerning number of A24’s out of gas after one month. This problem was proving difficult to solve but working closely with Good Nature was making progress. The next day the rest of the traps were checked, and the tracking tunnel cards were retrieved for analysis. The result was disappointing although not entirely unexpected as the trap catch rates during the year were too high to indicate a further reduction in rat population. Unfortunately work on trap reliability wasn’t fast enough to prevent a deterioration in our tracking tunnel results for 2025. They slipped from 7.5% in 2024 to 25% in 2025. This trip is the first time we have adopted an activation check on the A24 traps and we had sufficient trap bodies to replace all the leaking ones. Having completed this trap network review, we should be close to having the A24’s fully operational for the entire rebait cycle. Testing the firing action on the Feb 2026 trip will confirm this. Again, any traps that fail the test fire will receive a new trap body to continue with improving the trapping efficacy.
After completing the island work on Saturday Ted and Fraser returned to Mana and Bruce went to Picton. Southern Cross and Leo spent the night at resolution before getting up early and doing a spot of fishing then returning to Mana in reasonable conditions.
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