Raft Race

 

 

 

 

Last weekend we went over the hill to Taipa for a raft race.
It had been organised as a way to bring together all the local church youth groups. What a good idea!
I think that this is the third year that the race has been held. It is the first time that we were involved.
It was a typical Far North event and most enjoyable for that.
No fuss, advertised by word of mouth, looked like it was not going to happen, seemingly crazy to a safety obsessed ex-Englishman. And in spite of all those things, thought had gone into it. There were 2 safety boats. The course was about 4 km down a pretty wild estuary with limited road access. The rafts ranged from the ramshackle to pretty seaworthy. In fact one girl swam the whole way holding onto a piece of bamboo. The kids themselves were fully involved in the whole thing as they had built the rafts and most crews were all under 18's. What is more, they all reached the finishing point, some needing a bit of a tow from the boats to make sure that we were not waiting too long at the finishing point. They all enjoyed themselves and were all stretched mentally and physically.
Despite all these good things, I am pretty certain that if the same event had been proposed in England, it would have been banned - or made so cumbersome with safety regulations that everyone would have been tied up in knots! And yet all the positives came out and no-one has drowned yet.
That is why I like living here!

Stuart was our family representative as he is most active in the youth group and had helped to build the raft. His friend Lance completed the great voayge as well.
We finished up at Taipa Sailing Club, with the obligatory sausage sizzle and spot prizes followed by some beach games. Choice!

Stuart ready for the long-jump

 

2010 A&P show

 

 

 

 

Last Sat was the A&P show. This is one of the big events on the Kaitaia social calendar. As usual the main event for most of the College students is Friday night. We went on Saturday, which is the main show day.

On the Thursday night we put some last minute entries to the indoor section. Stuart had been working on a Hellboy gun and he was stoked to win First prize with it. I( entered 3 categories of the veggy section and was pretty chuffed to get 3rd for my yellow tomatoes and 2nd for my dwarf beans.

The show was the usual mix of fair and commerce and animals and horses. I enjoyed meeting some familiar faces hanging around the greeny sections. We also helped the ATC to person one of the entrance gates.

Other news this week: we had a big dump of rain on Tuesday night. About 2 inches fell overnight. It helped to keep our tank fuller than it had been. The soil remains very dry. We are on a high fire alert and the town water supply is critically low. They are even talking of rationing and turning off for hours at a time. One of the school kids asked me if the school would be shut if the water was cut off. I said that it might be and her response was to tell everyone to turn on all the taps to bring forward that time!

Wednesday was School Athletics Day. Very hot and a fullon outside day. Lots of good things. Eric has got himself a catering role. Along with a number of other non-athletic souls, he was on the cooking party. They went around with tasteful stripey blue aprons, carrying tea and scones to the teachers scattered all over the grounds. He reckoned that he walked further than most of the runners ran in their races.

Stuart had to wear red to represent his House (Ngarimu). He informed us at 8am on Wednesday that he had nothing red, in a display of true adoloescent good planning. He ended up going round all day in a rather sweaty red Swanndri ( a NZ woollen knee length hunters shirt).

Very dry!

A few pictures to show just how dry it is.
The garden still produces good crops. We are eating cucumbers, beans, peas, tomatoes, a bit of corn, kale, silverbeet fresh with plenty more crops to come.
The dam (pond) is drying up. The picture shows its level tonight. Normally it is 5 feet higher. We are just getting no rain. When clouds form they pass over with barely a drop landing. We have had no decent rain since December. Sign of the times or El Nino?

We had a quiet weekend last. That is pretty much what we all needed as the previous week had been pretty busy. I am starting to get warmed up with the breakneck pace of school. It takes me by surprise every year. If we did not have such good long restful holidays, I would never get to the blissful state of restedness that I achieve by late January. Teachers over here look years younger in January than they do in December!

So, we went to town and purchased paint and materials for the roof. The iron from which it is made had become rusted in places, so applying the stitch-in-time principle Stuart and I went up and sanded and primed and eventually top coated the main rusty bits. On Sunday we did our usual Sunday morning bits, had a big dinner and then went out to Diggers to see Ruth and Stephan. We cooled off from the muggy heat in their deluxe alfresco swimming pond. I am in training for a tryathlon so it was my first bit of swim training. Much nicer than the session I did this Wednesday in the town pool, eyes stinging from the chlorine and no sign of the dragonflies that kept me company at the country venue.

Ruth showed us some of their special plants and I took pictures of the ones I was unfamiliar with. Kohekohe is abundant in their bush. There was a matai and a tree that we could not identify. Great fun and it adds a whole new dimension to being outside.

Family news: all settling in well at school. patrick enjoyed a trip to the RNZAF brass band with school on Wednesday. Eric is enjoying his Year 10 Food Technology classes and expands his repertoire of basic dishes. Stuart is apparently doing well in German. One of the advantages of teaching in the same school as your kids. You get to keep a close eye on what is going on. They are both in the 2010 Kaitaia College Chess Tournament.

Kayak to Lane Cove

Chantelle, a friend called Ty and I all spent last Saturday kayaking out to Lane Cove in the Whangaroa Harbour.
As you can see from the pictures the place is pristine. We had been to the wharf at Totara North before for a fish and had watched boats heading out. It was great to follow in their wakes and see what lay around each corner.

It was Chantelle's first kayak journey and she did very well. We worked out from Google Earth that we must have paddled at least 12km. Conditions were good, apart from a head wind on both the way out and the way back (how does that work then?).

Lane Cove is an arm of Whangaroa where DOC have built a hut so that people can stay overnight. No food, cookers or electric ... just a roof over your head and some bunks. I will certainly be figuring a way to get out there again for an overnighter. Ty is more experienced at the kayaking and he trots out to offshore islands to camp. He had a little rod on his boat and he even managed to catch a snapper as we were moving along.

We got out for a stretch at Lane Cove and climbed up a steep path to the lookout high above. basically on top of the rocks you can see in one picture. The view from the top was stunning and panoramic. I have included just the seaward view.

We went home happy, if a little stiff in places. The boys had separated up to various friends to allow us a bit of quality "us" time. Hopefully we will do it again some time soon.

Bush walk 1

 

 

 

 

Went for a 7 hour bush walk yesterday with Stephan the trapper.

Another belting day out. Good conversation, plenty of new plants and animals to look at. Stephan wa working as we walked round the 200 acre block of bush, checking and resetting traps that had caught a couple of hedgehogs and a rat. The block has been trapped for several years to reduce predator numbers so that kiwi, other native birds and animals can live unmolested.

For those who are interested, the black olive looking fruit is from a tree called the taraire. The white daisy like flowers are from Kirk's tree daisy, the butterfly on the ragwort is a small copper. The smiling bloke is Stephan. A man who enjoys his work!

We got back to his house in time for a refreshing dip and then we were called out to do a search and rescue for an 87 year old neighbour who had not come back from his bush walk. The police had scrambled a team from Whangarei by chopper. The local SAR team assembled from all over the Far North. Meanwhile the ragtaggle team of local police and neighbours did an initial sweep through the bush close to his abandoned quad bike. We were about to go back to HQ, when Ruth spotted the guy wandering up a track out of the bush. He looked a bit bemused to see nigh on 40 people gathered in his back garden! All's well that ends well.

Bush walk

 

 

 

 

Plants

 

 

 

 

Lots of plants on Motorua.
It has been farmland for most of the time that Europeans have been in the area, with the area under native plants gradually being reduced. With the advent of the shareholder idea, a conscious decision was made to plant large areas with native plants and to bring back some of the original fauna.
I was very lucky to have a guided tour of the Ponga trach with Carol Ralph on our last day on the island. She is very knowledgeable and taught me many new plants. She had helped to steer the valley from grassland to developing forest. It is difficult to convey the forest in pictures and even harder using words. I found the walk and talk very inspirational, because I am trying to do something similar, though on a smaller scale with our land. I also want to involve a group of College students with a restoration project this year.
So thanks Carol and all the other enthusiasts on Motorua, keep up the great work.

The pictures show a Nikau Palm, the shade house where the native plants are grown. Then a plant that I have not identified yet - it has a large seed pod full of itching powder hairs and red kideney shaped seeds. Anyone know what it is?
Finally, the gun emplacement at the eastern end of the island. The army were here in WWII defending the bay from potential invaders. They left behind some large concrete structures that are slowly being eaten away by the forces of nature.

Swimming

 

 

 

 

The boys did much swimming. Not all of it was documented, but I like this sequence of Paddy jumping off the wharf.
Eric was keen too. The boys spent their days in a round of swimming, eating, talking loudly, playing swing-ball, lounging about and then back to swimming again.
Chantelle and I read heaps.
I found a really good book that had been left by someone. It was called "Three cups of tea" by Greg Mortenson. It tells the true story of how this US climber visited K2 in Pakistan and promised he would return to the remote mountain village to build a school. This he did with great persistence and economy. He is a very charismatic man who continues to do the humanitarian thing of helping people whilst the leadership of his country persists in thinking they can impose their ideology on the Moslem world down the barrel of a gun. Get the book out of your library if you can.

Fishing

 

 

 

 

You know how much we like fishing!
Every night we went out to cast out lines. We caught mostly snapper that were too small to take back and eat. By law they have to be 27cm long. The penalties for breaking this are severe. Besides which it is not good for the future to eat all the small ones.
We ate some sort of fish every day. Pan fied snapper was best.
Chantelle caught the biggest fish - a trevally. Squid on large hooks was the preferred bait. Using small hooks caught too many undersize snapper. Pilchard was not good bait. Spinning was useless, not a single take.

More birds

 

 

 

 

Picasa seems to have some glitch and wants another picture of Paddy being a dork rather than a dead penguin, so trying again in this one.
Also there is a kakariki (red-croned parakeet) hidden in the trees. They are a nationally rare bird that are looked after in the predator free island. This bird lives free in the back garden of CJ's house. It came to see us when he called.
No prizes for identifying NZ's national bird the kiwi. This is a male apparently on account of his short bill. Eric took his picture at night using a flash camera. I deleted the dozens of attempts i made at getting a picture. They were very confiding birds. They came out to feed shortly after dark in the paddocks and grass fields very close to our cottage.
The eggs are also kiwi, in an abandoned nest burrow, that had been dug out of a hillside. We could not believe how big they were!