Well today Sunday Nov 16th I am sitting back at Ray’s Rest, Kaiaua again, this time on the way to Stony Bay on the Coromandel Peninsular.
Since I last posted a great deal has happened.
Last week I got to meet a friend that I had met on the internet for the first time in real life. Allison was heading from Tauranga to Christchurch for the weekend via Auckland, so I picked her up from West Auckland and took her to the airport and retrieved her on Sunday when she got back. We spend a lovely time on Monday when I went for my CT scan and then we headed out for a train trip to Glen Eden to pick up her car and then she dropped my back at Takanini and she headed southwards back to Tauranga.
More exciting news is that my son James got married yesterday to Larney Smith and it was a great little ceremony. Steam Punk themed and held at their home. So now I have a daughter-in-law who is Mrs Church!
James and his son Christopher is the main picture and as soon as I get my memory card back I will post some more.
Further to my medical issues, I am now looking at medical misadventure and ACC is now in the mix. What happened was that the scar tissue tore a hole inside my inner ear and broke one of the remaining bones thus rendering me permanently pretty much deaf in my left ear. Also the nausea and giddiness will settle eventually but the brain needs to learn balance with the reduced input from the left ear. Will take months…… still the good news is that the right ear is clean and although there is a retraction, it will not need any work done for a long time and not until everything on the left settles completely.
Further to the not so good… on Thursday morning I got the milk out of the fridge for breakfast and thought that it was not very cold… on checking the freezer was on the way to being thawed and the fridge was not doing its thing at all well. Luckily I was parked up at my sister’s at the time and was able to quickly transfer the contents of the freezer to hers as well as the contents of he fridge. So then Friday was spend getting a new cooling unit installed onto my fridge and more ventilation happening around the back of the fridge.
It turns out that the vent in the side of the bus to allow ventilation for the fridge was insufficient to maintain the required cooling. The ammonia then crystallises and the fridge then goes kaput! So when the guy from the refrigeration place showed me the size of vent that Dometic say is required I nearly had a heart attack. It was twice the size of the current one and has far move holes in it. When we looked at where it would go there was a structural member angling through the area, so after much discussion with various people I have settled on fans to force the circulation. A little noise from them but should get used to it. If not I can put them on a switch to turn off at night. So a whole day spent sorting that out and not making a lemon meringue pie for my son’s wedding. $1600 later all is well with my fridge.
So onto better news…..
On Friday Dec 19th the Fredrock Cafe and I will be sailing across the Hauraki Gulf to Great Barrier Island (Aotea) where I will be spending 4 weeks as a Dept of Conservation camp manager at the Akapoua campsite. It is currently closed but I am told by those that are in the know it will be open again for the season.
Akapoua Campsite (have a look)
It is one of the smaller ones and is just around from Port Fitzroy on the northern end of the island.
After that it looks like I will be heading south to manage Kidds Bush DoC campsite, but that hasn’t been confirmed yet.
Kidds Bush (have a look)
So its going to be a full on Christmas/New Year and start of the year.
So today I had a go at launching my new kite fishing rig. I did a test run without hooks on it and it was successful and then loaded up a couple of hooks with bait and sent it aloft again. This time I caught a bird! A large black backed gull got tangled in the line, nowhere near a hook. So with the help of a couple of bystanders we managed to untangle the bird and set it free, but it decided to have a go at me on the way out, luckily I had my big heavy gloves on so it did no damage.
Put the kite back out and took it past the edge of the mud bank and left it there for a while and then reeled it back in….quite a lot of line went out!
and not a single fish, looked like there was not even a nibble as all three baits were still intact. I should have let it go further and left it out longer, but it was quite a successful afternoon as far as learning how to control and set the rig.
On the list of neat things, my flowers have been doing really well and have a couple of tomato flowers that I have been pollinating by hand.
Well tomorrow off to see the doctor in Thames for my Hepatitis shots for the DoC work and then off up the peninsular.
Safe travels everyone.
