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!

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.