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.