Foveaux Strait is shallow — in places barely thirty metres deep — and that single fact explains most of its reputation. Southern Ocean swell arriving from the west finds no depth to absorb it, so it stands up instead. The thirty-kilometre channel between Bluff and Rakiura has therefore always been a passage rather than a destination, and every Stewart Island ferry booking made today traces a line that whalers, oyster dredgers and mail boats have worked since the 1820s. Māori named the island Te Punga o Te Waka a Māui, the anchor stone of Māui's canoe. The European name honours William Stewart, first officer aboard the sealing brig Pegasus, who charted much of the southern coast in 1809. Bluff, the mainland terminal town at 21 Foreshore Road, is among the oldest continuously settled European towns in New Zealand. Its wharves still send out the dredges that work the Bluff oyster beds, a fishery prosecuted in the same water the catamarans cross. Rakiura National Park, gazetted in 2002, covers roughly eighty-five percent of the island. Oban, on Halfmoon Bay, is the only township — a few hundred residents, a single general store, some twenty-eight kilometres of sealed road. Everything past that is granite, podocarp bush and beach. Stewart Island ferry booking tours carry trampers toward the Rakiura Track, one of the country's Great Walks, and birders toward Ulva Island in Paterson Inlet, a predator-free sanctuary where saddleback and rifleman feed at ankle height. The southern brown kiwi, tokoeka, outnumbers the human population many times over. The working craft of the strait are purpose-built aluminium catamarans, hulls drawn for water that can turn from glass to two-metre chop inside an hour. The Bluff terminal is unadorned: a low shed, a car park, a jetty pointing south past Stirling Point, where State Highway 1 runs out of country. Nothing about the Bluff to Halfmoon Bay crossing is scenic in the alpine sense. What it offers is a horizon line, mollymawks working the wake, and the slow resolution of a dark coast into individual trees. Stewart Island ferry booking tickets remain, for most travellers, the only practical door into Rakiura — the island the aurora australis named, glowing skies over a coast with no streetlights to argue with.