Moturoa Birds

 

 

 

 

Lots of birds on Moturoa.
It is managed as a wildlife refuge. We took lots of pics and here are some of them:
Baby white-fronted tern with red billed gull on the wharf.
Banded rail which stalked around our cottage, coming right up to the back door sometimes.
Dead blue penguin with colour rings on its right wing, washed up on Picnic Beach.
Fantail (piwakawaka) on fence by the orchard.

Moturoa Island

 

 

 

 

We are just back from our 5 day retreat on Moturoa. It was a retreat from computers, phone, garden, house work. No cars, no shops! Lots of water, boats and birds. Very relaxing! More pictures on the way and will be added before this post.

Kaitaia Walkway

 

 

 

On Saturday we finally completed the Kaitaia Walkway from start to finish!
We have attacked this bush walk a number of times from the Kaitaia end, but had never got very far.
Now that the boys are older and have done more walking with me and the ATC, it wa stime to nail this one. Chantelle very kindly agreed to drive us to the start and to pick us up at the end.

It was a pretty easy walk - 4 hours, well marked, fairly even gradient and just the odd boggy patch. We met some angry wasps who gave Eric and Amos a few stings. Paddy struggled at the end with his shoes and went barefoot. We saw a lot of pig sign and heard some crashing in the undergrowth deep in the bush that might have been porcine.

Around Kaitaia

 

 

 

 

More Paua Pictures

 

 

 

 

Part One
Last weekend we went to Paua for a couple of nights camping. It is a small peninsular that sticks out into the Parengarenga harbour on the East Coast about 100km North of Kaitaia. It is a special place to me on account of being very beautiful, remote, unpopulated, clean and full of interesting plants and animals. Just around the corner on the harbour is the most northern settlement of New Zealand - Te Hapua.

Paua is reknowned for its strong winds and the campsite is a field on the edge of the estuary with no real shelter from these strong winds. Can you see where this one is going? The happy campers that left town on Saturday were Patrick, Stuart, their friend Lance and myself. We spent hours gathering bits of gear from where it had all been stored, spent more time trying to squeeze it into the Capella. The petrol station was heaving with tourists and Pak'N'Save was likewise busy as. We stopped at Te Kao store for the obligatory icecream and to pick up the key to get into the field. They only charge $5 per night per vehicle, so it is possibly the cheapest campsite we have ever paid to stay on.

On arrival we found the field less busy than I had expected, given that camping over the New Year is a great NZ tradition. We selected a site close to the boat ramp so as to be able to launch the kayak easily. I noted that a)the other tents were clustered around what shelter there was - in the form of a couple of small mounds and b) that our tent was a lot bigger than the others.

Tent erection is one of those activities fraught with stress especially when the conditions are in any way non-ideal. In this case I was the sole adult and some of the helpers were not as co-operative as they might have been. Added to that I soon realized that our trusty tent had suddenly gone grey, it was old and worn with a tear here, a bent pole there and a few fastenings that were broken. We bought it for 100 quid from a wharehouse in Blackburn in 2002. And did I mention that it was windy? Not a gentle sea-breeze playing with us, but a persistent canvas flapping, no-messing proper Far North wind.

Well, the tent was finally erected and looked like it would cope. The gear was unloaded and stashed away and it was play time. Lovely view an expanse of sand uncovered by the low tide, a deep channel and the white sands of Kokota in the background separating us from the Pacific Ocean. The boys were happy playing in the sand, making fortifications and getting wet. It was warm and clean and very lovely.

Stuart decided that he was going to be chef that night and we started to assemble the cooking gear. Pans, plate, onions, mince, spagetti, gas bottle and stove. Something was not quite right, but I could not put my finger on it. Then it clicked! The gas bottle needed to be connected to the burner by a small innocuous looking tube that at that precise moment was attached to the other gas bottle on our deck back in Kaitaia. Duh!

We had our evening meal up at Waitiki Landing, which is a service area that will be familiar to those of you who have been to the light house at the Cape. The lad who served us was in my science class at Te Hapua, and he very kindly let me use the phone to ring Chantelle to ask her to bring said tube next day when she was going to join us.

Paua Pictures

 

 

 

 

Paua Two
The susnset that night was fanatstic and the wind had dropped quite a bit. We had full bellies and life was good. The boys palyed hide and seek and we all retired early to our sleeping bags.

I was up before dawn the next morning and was amazed at how calm was! Check out the sunrise in the almost cloudless sky. I wandered over to the wharf and found a lady there from Kaitaia, making a seroius attempt to catch kingfish. She had staked out her claim to one side of the wharf and was using 3 livebait rods and several other to catch pipers to use as bait. I had a good yarn and watched all the parore and tother fish in the clear water. I walked down the track to the fish farm and watched a van load of blokes getting ready to fish the shallows. In a dry and dusty paddock just over the road were a dispersed flock of at least 10 banded dotterels. I had never really watched this bird before, so gave them some time. Back to the tent and the boys had not stirred. It was very relaxing just sitting and watching the tide slowly coming in. I could see small flocks of kuaka - bar tailed godwit moving from their feedng areas to higher ground as the waters rose. Watching the kuaka was one of the highlights of the trip for me, as I had been up to Paua on day-trips before to count them. This time I witnessed 2 tidal cycles of their comings and goings.

Mid-morning Stuart and I paddled the kayak over to the Kokota and had a walk on the famous white sands. I had seen a large flock of kuaka flying to a roost site somewhere on the spit and was keen to count them at high tide. The spit was deceptively wide. I walked across it and found many interesting things - tracks of small animals, a couple of shell middens from ancient Maori camps, a trio of whale skeletons , incredibly clear greenish blue water. A coconut and a small amount of trash, but no flock of kuaka. They can fly a lot faster than I can walk, so I returned to where Stuart was waiting with the kayak and we paddled back to camp.

Other activities that day included reading, snorkelling, making a huge doughnut in the sand and fishing. Chantelle arrived with the gas pipe, so we could make a nice spag bol for lunch. The wind gradually got strong again and started to mash the tent. Chantelle was keen to try out her Xmas present - a rod and reel - so we had a fish in the channel at low tide. She christened it with lots of little snapper and then finally a bigger one that we could take home to eat.

Meanwhile, my prediction that the wind would drop as it had done the previous night was not being fulfilled. The tent was getting hammered. It was horrible to watch this inanimate object basically being "killed" by the cruel wind. The tent was just a pile of synthetic material held up with fibreglass poles. But it had also been our home in countless paddocks raging from the Isle of Man to the South Island of New Zealand. It had sheltered us on the major faultline in Wellington, from torrential rain in East Anglia and was now being trashed by the Paua wind. When two of the fibreglass poles split, the shape went very unnatural and it was all off. The decision to abort camp was made at 6.30pm and a very co-operative team of boys bundled everything into 2 cars in a short time and that was that. We arrived home expecting Eric to be put out that we had returned early. He was relieved that we were back as he was just starting to feel lonely!

Postscript: our lovely tent now lies abandoned on the back lawn. It will spend its latter years in close contact with the earth stopping grass from coming up down in the garden. Stuart has requisitioned the poles.

More fishing pics

 

 

 

These were also taken before Xmas on a fishing trip that started before dawn. Eric, Chantelle and I went to Puketu Island to get stranded by the high tide. I wrote about it in a previous post. Note Chantelle's fishing stance!
We had to wait for about an hour for the tide to go out enough to get off. Even then the water went over my wellies. The pics show Chantelle and Eric walking back across the causeway.
We have done quite a lot of fishing this holiday. It is one of the major hobbies around here. Lots of people have boats and go out to catch a feed of snapper. I have tried fishing from the kayak using a handline, but it has not been very successful so far. We have also had a couple of goes at floundering, where you go out at night with a torch and spear flounder in shallow estuaries. I think that you need to have some local knowledge for this one, because we have not even seen any flounder on the 2 occasions that we have been out.

On a change of note - and just in case there are any readers out there who are not obsessed with fishing(?) - Happy New Year to you all. May 2010 be good for you in diverse ways.

We saw in the New Year at a small gathering of mostly teachers, sat out in a back yard with music playing in the garage. This is a pretty typical Kaitaia party. We had a bbq of course and the beers and wines flowed freely. The boys stayed up until midnight and Patrick and another young girl first footed us with charcoal for warmth, whisky for spirit, money for wealth and bread for food.

 

 

 

 

Messing about in the water

 

 

 

 

Here there are some more pictures for your delectation. Thanks for putting me onto Picasa 3 Ian, it makes uploading pictures so much easier. It is a bit weird in the way that it does not recognize files of pictures that you have downloaded into My Docs, but it is loading them up to Blogger a lot more easily than their own editing software allows. If anyone is struggling with large file sizes, then let me know. I have stopped compressing them before uploading. This saves me time and the upload time on broadband is minimal. If you are on dial-up then that will make a difference.

Anyway back to those pictures. Got a batch coming through from before xmas. Accept it - this blog is non-chronological at the moment. We download pictures onto 2 different computers and the pictures you see depend which one I am on when I decide to blog. It being the holidays and having 5 fairly intensive net users in the house, the hardware is definitely not having a holiday.

So we have one version of our Christmas family photo. We managed to all be together in one place atte same time, not arguing too visibly and having an extra person (thanks Rissy) to take the photos. The venue is our back garden with a fern in the background.

There are 2 pics of a fishing trip I went on with a friend to Marlin Rock, off the top of the Karikari peninsular. We reached it by an exhilarating boat ride. It is a small 200m by 30m rock that juts out of deep water and is a popular place to catch big fish - hence the name. We caught a variety on the day we went - I caught barracuda, small snapper, parore, rock cod, moray eel, parrot fish (the only one I took home to eat) and best of all hooked onto a 2m blue shark. That had some power in it when it decided that it did not want to be attached to my line - it took off at lots of knots and came up to the surface , flicked its tail to slice through the line and that was that. Right at the start I hooked onto what we thought was a very large snapper. Whatever it was was also stripping line off the reel making it scream. It went down very deep and bit through the line. That was the end of that! All in all an amazing place to be and a great experience.

The last picture shows me taking the 2 man kayak that I have borrowed down the Aurere river on my first proper sea trip. I went round the island we normally get stranded on and then carried on along the beach for quite a way. It was a 6km trip and was quite tiring as the wind was strong.

Stuart cooking the Christmas BBQ

 

Xmas Day on the lawn

 

Stuart cooked the dinner on the bbq. The adults escaped to the lawn to eat in peace. The tarp over the washing line kept the strong sun from burning us all. A nice breeze blew up the valley.

We were joined by Mike and Risssy and Ruben. Patrick is doing a monkey impression.

Stoat killer

 
Camo is our wildest cat. She has brought in 2 stoats in the last 2 weeks. Not a bad effort considering she is only small herself.

Stuart and Chantelle

 

Stuart represented the family at Chantelle's graduation the other week.

Chantelle's graduation

 

Thanks Ian for the Picasa site. This is my first attempt.
This is a picture of Chantelle with friend at her graduation from the Community Ministries course that she has been doing all year.

Nearly Xmas

Hi folks.
The wotrd is coming back from the Northern Hemisphere that we have not done a blog in a while.
True!
And what could our excuse be as we are all on our summer holidays?
Fact is the less you have to do, the less you do.
Plus, the weather is great! Sorry to evryone who is struggling with snow in the UK and Europe. We have seen pics of harassed looking travellers getting stuck n Dover trying to flee blighty and being caught out by Eurostar problems, closed airports and buses not running.
Meanwhile we are having a drought here in Kaitaia. The ground is seriously dry. I have been cutting hayy with the scythe - keeps me fit- and it has been drying almosty to dust as it falls to the ground. The veggy garden requires constant irrigation to keep on producing. Getting some good crops from it mind. Tonight we had kahawai baked with home grown garlic and sorrel plus homegrown red poattaoes and sweetcorn (bought). Choice.

We spent the whole day stranded on Puketu island on the East coast. Stuart stayed home to make Star wars accessories. Paddy beat the 3hour tV and screen limit by staying over at Rubens. Eric came with us sans rod and acted as chief fish killer and gutter. We left at 5am and were fishing at daybreak at 6ish. Cool to spend so long fishing that you eventually have had enough and just watch the water and the wildlife and wait for the tide to drop enough to get back to the mainland.

The water was so calm at dawn, like a mill pond all the way out to sea. As the day warmed up a n onshore breeze developed that ended up chopping the water up. We brought home small kahawai and feasted on them. There were other fish rock cod and parore, but we threw them back.

A pair of Great black backed gulls watched us from a grassy ledge all day, calling constantly. Asd long as we were fairly stationary, they did not mind us, but if we walked about they would launch aerial assaults on us, dive bombing our heads and crying out. Puzzling behaviour as there were 2 together doing this and no sign of any nest or young. Round the other side of the island were a family of gulls complete with roly poly youngsters mewing away.

School finished for all of us a week ago, so we are in holiday mode full swing. The wake-up is stretching out later as everyone slowly unwinds. We will shortly be into breakfast happening post midday! Bring it on.

I want to load up pictures from this puter but have lost my Adobe photoshop cd that compresses the pictures to a small enough size to speed up theup and download.
Any one got any ideas on a free web based compression service or other solution?
Cheers
and heres to an update before we go back to school in February.
Stay warm you N hem peeps. How's about we swap you some of our warmth for some of your rain?

Summer arrives

Well the zeal did not last very long did it?
This is the first weekend since January that I have not needed to do any schoolwork at all. To make up for that, I have spent the last two weekends marking end of year exams and then writing reports.
The academic work for the year as far as the sudents go is nearly all done. Our seniors finished a few weeks ago. They went on exam leave to take their external exams. That left us with the juniors who are the Year 9 and 10's. Eric is year 9 and he was busy revising for and taking exams. They have a taste of what they will get in Year 11, 2 hours of joy in a hot hall trying to remember everything they have done all year. In the event Eric has done pretty well by all accounts. I was pleased with my two classes as well, as they had done lots of revision and took the exams seriously and reaped the rewwards of that.

So now we have got all that out of the way, we are into camp season. The weather has been scorching in the last few days. That bodes well for our varying school plans. I am off up north next week with the Year 10's on camp. It is quite an institution at our place and the kids talk about Y10 camp for years afterwards. I am helping with the kayaking activity. A replacement hatch (of the right size) finally arrived this week and we managed to find an hour yesterday to give the craft a go. It was quite windy so we just went to Unahi wharf and I took it for a paddle across the harbour. It was very cool being able to explore across the water from where we have stood for many hours. I beached the kayak in some mangroves and got out. I had always wondered what it was like where I was now standing. Very cool. Hopefully we will be able to borrow one for the summer.

Stuart and Paddy are both going on trips to Actionworld in Paihia for their end of year trips. Eric has a schol based activity week. He will try a range of craft and sporting and other activities. A nice way to end the year.

Chantelle has almost finished her course and is starting to imagine life without assignments. She has started to read books that are not about the Bible for the first time in over a year. It was our 15th wedding anniversary on Thursday! We went out for a meal at the Northern Indian last night. Very quiet in there but deliocious curries.

On her way back from her last block course down the line Chantelle bought me a scythe. It is an Austrian design and is very light compared to your average grim reaper design. That means that you can cut grass without being exhausted after 5 minutes. I have spent many a happy evening laying into the waist high grass that now coats our block. With the weather being dry I am basically making hay while the sun shines. I will use it for mulching and compost making. The garden is growing well. We are harvesting broad beans, strawberries and new potatoes. The peas will be ready to pick this week. In the past I have grown short rows of peas and very few have made it to the kitchen as Paddy is partial to them. This year I have grown a 10 foot row and have actually gone to the effort of giving them something to climb up. They are heavily laden. My polytunnel was getting so hot during the day that a lot of the seedlings were burnt, so I have taken off the plastic for now. The ground is very dry where it is not been regularly irrigated.

We got a present of a number of laying hens from Lyn recently. They were getting into her veggy patch. So we now have lots of eggs daily. Still not got a bantam to sit on them to make some chicks for us.

Camo the cat surprised us all yesterday by catching a stoat. We have been trying to trap it after Chentelle saw it run across the drive a few months ago. They are quite fierce little animals so Camo as done us proud.

Having a few troubles loading up pictures at the mo as we have lost the Adobe program off the computer that has the photos on it. I will try and get it sorted in the summer.

Weekly update

Full of new zeal for the blog, here is another update.

We are looking forward to a weekend of warm settled weather as a high slowly crosses. I have been teaching my Year 11 class about weather forecasting this week, and we have been watching this high as it formed over Tasmania. For a change it has reached us in time for the weekend. Often at this time of year we get into a pattern of lows at the weekend followed by highs on Mondays!

Last w/e was a 3 day one and marked the official start of the summer as Monday was Labour Day. The forecast was giving out rain for Sunday and Monday, so we went out for our fun on Saturday. I was actually crook on Saturday, with almost no voice and a thick cough. That wasn't going to stop us as we had an evening kayaking trip planned. We took off to Tokerau beach, because the swells were supposed to be small there and also because it tends to fish well in the evenings.

The plan was to set up 2 lines baited with 3 hooks and a big sinker on the end. Two fishing rods were set up on the beach with the line free to come off the spools. I put both weights into the rear hatch of the kayak and lightly screwed it down. Then I was pushed off into the surf to take the lines out. Even though it was very calm, it still took some effort to get out. The kayak is very wide and stable so takes some paddling to get moving. I was going all out trying to get beyond the breakers. I was encouraged by the shouting of the family back on the beach and kept going until I was in deep water. When it felt safe to turn round and see if I was far enough to drop the weights. Everyone was waving to me from the shore - what a great family I have - I thought - backing me up 100%!.

I looked at the hatch to remove the lid and got a jolt when i realised that it was not there any more. There were no lines in it either! I turned round and had an exhilarating ride back in, carried by the surf and getting tipped over as the wave shifted the kayak sideways.

Apparently one of the lines had got stuck on the reel and the operator (who shall remain nameless) had tugged the rod and pulled the hatch off. It was made from dense plastic and disappeared into the surf never to be seen again. So that was the end of the kayaking for that night. I have been trying to obtain a replacement hatch, because I definitely want to do it again. I might carry the weights differently next time!

We had hot chips for supper and that was a good night out. We went to a bbq on Sunday at the home of the Salvation Army captains - Helen and Bernie. As predicted, it rained a lot on Monday so we had a quiet day at home. That was our long weekend all over.

Family news: Stuart is getting ready for going to College. He brought home a guitar body from school tonight and is going to restring it. We finished off his chicken coop last week and put the cock in with the rescue hen. They seem to be getting on OK. She is a red hen from the battery farm. They sell them off in pretty poor condition when they are a year old. Our friends bought her but she was getting harassed by their chucks so she came to us as a refugee.

Eric is coming home with some good school results. He is learning German with Frau Schoffa and got 100% in a recent test. He is quite dedicated towards his work. He is currently trying to catch a possum that frequents our bottom field. It has been going into the live trap and removing the bait, without getting caught.

Patrick has whacked his elbow tonight and is looking a bit pale. This is the one that he broke recently. His mate Ruben is over for the w/e, so they are into all things pokemon. Patrick bid for and won an auction on Trademe for some Pokemon cards. He was very helpful in the garden for a week while earning the money to pay for them, but he seems to have tailed off since then.

Chantelle is out at her group tonight. She has been working in the Sally's shop this week, as they have been short staffed. She needs a new picture on here as she has acquired some hair straighteners and looks quite different.

That's about it apart from a bit of local news: they are doing up the main street of Kaitaia again, putting in new footpaths and benches. The local environmental business centre that employs 70 odd people in a variety of eco jobs celebrated its 20th birthday today.
National news: Rodney Hide is being questioned over his use of taxpayer money for taking his girlfriend on holiday to the Uk.

Til next week.