I find Dive North by the pier in Pahia, about an hour and a half drive from Tutukaka. The boat journey across the bay and round the corner to the Rainbow Warrior normally takes just over an hour. In the rough sea today it takes getting on for two and a half hours.
The Rainbow Warrior is a pilgrimage for any diver with environmental sympathies. Mined and sunk by a French secret service team who got away with a token penalty and a culpable government who got away completely, it is a fine example of state sponsored terrorism by a nation that holds weapons of mass destruction. I'd better stop ranting before GW and Tony decide to invade France.
By coincidence, the New Zealand government was using the survey ship Tui, now an artificial reef at Tutukaka, to keep an eye the same series of French nuclear tests as Greenpeace's Rainbow Warrior was destined to disrupt.
The wreck is marked by a buoy attached to a big concrete mooring block off the stern. With the stormy sea visibility has dropped to the point that from the mooring I can just make out the wreck 8 metres away.
Inside I find shoals of cardinal fish, then on the hull some nosy red pigfish and resting goatfish. Some big kingfish circle off the starboard side. It's a nice little wreck with a good coating of anemones.
Under the stern the propeller is gone, now standing on a nearby headland as a memorial. I look hard for photographs that are different to the iconic shot looking back along the bow that everyone seems to take.
The second dive is a fairly nondescript rocky reef. Pleasant and a good opportunity to snap some fish portraits, but a filler and not the sort of dive that would inspire me to go halfway round the planet. Dive guide Phil tells me that better sites are nearby, but not in today's rough sea.
If Cousteau had still been diving when the Rainbow Warrior was sunk it would have made an interesting conflict of interests. If you go to New Zealand, you have to dive the Rainbow Warrior.