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.