"She looks really beautiful; she's going past some guys collecting cockles; they are wading and the tide is advanced; there are seven of them ... anyway, sorry about that. Where were we?"
This set of quotes tells a story in itself: Peat, the keen observer; a collector of many details; a man in love with the sea; an author of 40-odd books who is aware of the myriad tangents he can take in his craft, should he allow himself to be distracted.
The latest career twist has been lengthy. Turning his gaze from the mountains, fauna and folk on which he based 2008's High Country Lark: an Invitation to Paradise, Peat focuses on another great divide, the Tasman Sea.
"The idea was suggested to me about four years ago," Peat explains. "It's a complex book and one people aren't necessarily going to read from one end to the other. It is a reference work as well as something people can enjoy if they want to get some travel stories or investigate something they may have read in the newspaper."
His collaboration with Brian Patrick, Wild Dunedin: Enjoying the Natural History of New Zealand's Wildlife Capital, won the Natural Heritage category at the 1996 Montana New Zealand Book Awards, while Wild Fiordland: Discovering the Natural History of a World Heritage Area, also written with Patrick, was short-listed for the same prize in 1997.
Peat has long had an interest in the sea. After entering journalism at Dunedin's Evening Star newspaper in the 1970s, he got his first overseas job as a shipping writer in Cape Town at a time when the Suez Canal was closed, meaning vessels came around the Cape of Good Hope.
"Looking back, I have had so much to do with writing about the sea, ships and harbours.
"The West Coast of the South Island was a second home for quite a while because I worked in commercial whitebait fishing in the mid-'70s; I rode a bike along much of the length of the West Coast and wrote a guidebook to it; and the third book I ever did was about whitebait fishing on the coast, so I had a connection to the Tasman.
"The first time I went out to sea was in a 100-foot vessel, the Heather George, which belonged to the MacLeod family, a very adventurous Dunedin family well known in the 1960s for making trips from New Zealand to the United Kingdom and back ... that set me off.
"That was followed by two years in Cape Town as shipping editor on the Cape Argus newspaper. I came back and wrote a column for the Evening Star about the Port of Otago.
"All those experiences of the sea gave me a feeling for it."
The view from Peat's house takes in the Portobello Marine Laboratory and the New Zealand Marine Studies Centre, "for which I wrote the displays".
The marine lab was initially a fish hatchery set up by a great-uncle of Peat's and has since evolved into "something that means quite a lot to me". The scientists at Portobello helped him with his book, as did other research institutions, including Niwa in Wellington and CSIRO in Hobart.
"Looking at the Tasman from a marine science point of view, you realize how complex it is. There are few parts of the world's oceans that have such an interaction of currents. It is a supermarket for marine life."
Look at one of those daily weather maps for New Zealand and you see a picture dominated by the Tasman Sea. It's a fitting image given much of our weather is shaped to the west.
New Zealand's settlement distribution pattern - in other words, where most of us choose to live - favours the Pacific coast, with its safer harbours and more equitable climate.
The western coast, "the weather coast", is by far the less populated side. Across the sea, it is the opposite scenario, the majority of Australians preferring the Tasman side.
Among various recordings of shipwrecks and near-disasters, Peat's book includes a photograph of the masses enjoying themselves at Australia's famous Bondi Beach, a reminder that some regard the Tasman as more of a playground than a place of peril.
"Sydneysiders are not as conscious that it is the Tasman Sea as we are. We are hit on a daily basis by weather forecasts that constantly refer to the Tasman Sea - that's where most of our weather comes from," says Peat, who also suggests "the ditch" is as much a unifying force as a barrier between New Zealand and Australia.
"I have always been interested in the Australia-New Zealand experience. Some of my best mates are Australian and I travelled in Africa and South America with them. They live in Hobart now.
"We often look at the Tasman Sea and think of it as a wild piece of water and from where we get our weather and identity, but it doesn't seem especially wide ... though it is certainly wide enough for us to think we are something different from Australians."
Another image, a stunning Nasa shot which reveals New Zealand's coastline and includes amid its blue background the often stormy Cook and Foveaux straits, serves as a metaphor for exploration both recent and historic.
"It is interesting you mention the space station looking down on New Zealand," Peat says.
"A few hundred years ago, that was probably how Abel Tasman or James Cook's expeditions were regarded in Europe. There were heading to the ends of the Earth."
In the book's third part, "Coast and Communities", Peat describes a series of journeys he undertook in 2008 in which he documents landforms, ecology and people.
He presents the subsequent chapters in a south-to-north direction, retracing the order in which places were mapped by Tasman and Cook.
"You are looking at about 3000km of seaboard on both sides. I had to start somewhere," Peat explains.
"Abel Tasman found Van Dieman's Land [Tasmania] first, so I started there then came across to the South Island. He went somewhere around the Punakaiki area and made landfall and poked his nose towards Cook Strait; there was a hint of a strait there but he didn't map it. He went on to the North Island and the Three Kings and away to Tonga.
"That left the eastern seaboard of Australia to be found by Cook, so that's why I did that last. I could've done it starting with New Zealand, but it made sense to follow the sequence of discoverers."
Long before being charting by our best-known European explorers, the Tasman Sea was first seen by Aboriginal Australians.
Continuous human settlement in Australia, the world's oldest landmass, can be traced back 40,000 years (some studies suggest more than 60,000 years). In contrast, eastern Polynesians arrived in New Zealand 800 to 1000 years ago.
Peat points out that early Maori recognised the Tasman as having an identity separate from the Pacific, calling the western sea Te Tai o Rehua (the Sea of Rehua, referring to the star Antares, an important celestial body in Maori folklore).
Over time, the relatively sheltered eastern seaboard came to be known as Taitamahine (the Sea of Maidens) and the western side Tiatamatane (the Sea of Warriors or Sea of Valour), reflecting the fact that several ancestral canoes, including the Tainui came to their final resting places on the Tasman coast.
Perhaps the most moving testament to the power of that body of water is Australian Andrew McAuley's ill-fated attempt to become the first person to paddle a kayak across the Tasman.
McAuley left Tasmania on January 11, 2007; 30 days later, at 7.15pm on February 9, a distress call was received, its co-ordinates indicating a position just 70km west of the entrance to Milford Sound. The words "sinking" and "I need a rescue" can just be heard on the recording.
Despite extensive searches by ship, plane and helicopter, McAuley was never found, although his vessel was. Among its contents was a digital camera featuring the face of a husband and father framed by a bright orange jacket.
It is a powerful image: a man, pallid, exhausted, even fearful. Competing for attention with all this emotion, looming large in the lens, is a monster wave. The Tasman, see.
• The book
The Tasman: Biography of an Ocean is published by Penguin. $40.
Fact file
Neville Peat is a Dunedin writer and photographer who has lived beside the sea for most of his life. He crossed the Tasman on his first overseas venture in 1969, aboard a P&O liner.
His many books explore themes of geography (from the Antarctic to tropical Tokelau), natural science and biography.
Since 1990, he has worked as a study leader and lecturer aboard expedition ships visiting New Zealand waters, including the subantarctic region.
In 2007, he was awarded New Zealand's largest literary prize, the Creative New Zealand Michael King Writers' Fellowship.
In 1994, Peat was honoured with the inaugural Dunedin Citizen of the Year title for a series of photographic souvenir books on Dunedin as well as the establishment of the Dunedin Environmental Business Network in 1993 and other environmental initiatives.
He was an Otago regional councillor from 1998 (re-elected 2001 and 2004) and was chairman of the environment and science committee and the ORC's deputy chairman from 2004 to 2007.
A short history ...
NATURAL
• 85 million years ago. Tasman Sea begins to open up as Zealandia separates from Gondwana.
• 52 million years ago. Tasman Sea reaches current width.
CULTURAL
• 1642. Abel Tasman's expedition crosses the Tasman, west-east, between Tasmania and the South Island.
• 1770. James Cook's expedition crosses the Tasman, east-west, between the South Island and mainland Australia.
• 1874. HMS Challenger, from Portsmouth, England, visits the Tasman Sea region on the first global oceanographic study.
• 1928. First transtasman flight (Charles Kingsford Smith and crew, Sydney to Christchurch).
• 1931. First solo transtasman flight (Guy Menzies, Sydney to South Island West Coast).
• 1952. Danish research vessel Galathea undertakes oceanographic studies in the Tasman Sea as part of a worldwide voyage of discovery.
• 1954. New Zealand Oceanographic Institute established.
• 1964. The end of the whaling industry in New Zealand.
• 1965. New Zealand territorial sea limit (12 nautical miles) established.
• 1977. First solo, self-propelled crossing of the Tasman, east-west (Colin Quincey,North Island to Sunshine Coast).
• 1978. New Zealand Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) declared.
• 1983. Closer Economic Relations Trade Agreement (CER) comes into force.
• 1994. United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea comes into effect.
• 1997. Orange roughy fishery reported to be one-fifth of the 1978 biomass.
• 1998. Australian Oceans Policy launched in conjunction with the International Year of the Ocean.
• 2001. New Zealand Ministry of Fisheries closes 19 seamounts to trawling.
• 2004. Australia's first regional marine plan launched, covering the southeast region.
• 2008. Australian and New Zealand submissions on extended continental shelf claims are accepted by the United Nations in April and September respectively.
Source: The Tasman: Biography of an Ocean.
