The weather has been on and off, with a great dosing of rain this morning from 5:30am to 7am or so but the day turned wonderful if a bit breezy.
Getting ahead of myself….Have been getting more visits from kereru…
and my lovely neighbours brought me in a pot of pipi which I had for lunch on a couple of cheese buns. Just lovely!
The bay itself has been filling up as well and there are more and more boats of varying sizes arriving.
One of the groups that have arrived is the Auckland University Dive Club and they are a lovely bunch of young people and they have been having fun.
but I have to say that they were very good to me today in brining over a lovely butter fish that I filleted and smoked. They also put some fillets in the smoker at the same time so we ended up with four large fillets, two with brown sugar and sweet chilli sauce marinade, one with a garlic marinade and one plain with no marinade. Absolutely lovely fish. I had the plain and sweet chilli fillets and they were fantastic with a fresh salad from my garden! For those who haven’t seen a butter fish….
The amazing thing is that when you fillet this fish the bones are a lovely green colour and I forgot to take a picture! but a beautiful fish with amazing markings that you don’t catch on a line, only by spear fishing as they are herbivorous.
New Years Eve was an interesting night here, had two groups singing and dancing til about 10:30pm when they all took off to the local club at Port FitzRoy and things got really quiet, until about 12:30am when the first lot got back. They had been swimming at the port and when they got back to camp they showered and there were a bunch of naked people wandering around the camp.....so after shuffling them off to their tents, the oth er group quietly snuck back in around 2:30, picked up their marquee and chilli bin and headed off up the track towards the waterfall and didn't come back til around 8:30am! So a quiet but long night. To top it off someone over in the bay let off some fireworks at around 4am and woke us all up again! Then the rain finally hit at 5:30 for a couple of hours and then it fined up to a lovely day, though still quite breezy, but a good start to the New Year.
One of the great things about doing a job like this is that you meet some really interesting people and I would like to tell you about 4 fascinating characters.
Meet from left to right….
Natasha from Cape Town, Deb from Port Angeles, Washington State, Paula from Wellington and Paul from Montreal.
What makes these people quite interesting is that they have been circumnavigating Great Barrier Island in their kayaks.
They arrived on the ferry in Tryphena, spent the night there and then paddled around the eastern side to Medlands Beach, then on to Harataonga Campsite, around the top of the island through the Needles to Miners Head and then on to us here in Akapoa Bay where they arrived yesterday and stayed today and are heading off down to Whangaparapara tomorrow then back to Tryphena.
But that is not all….. these are some of the worlds authorities on ocean kayaking. In 2008 there was a kayaking symposium held in Auckland under the name of Coast Busters, run by Paul and Natasha, to which Deb was invited to speak. it then progressed on to a International Kayaking Week involving 60 people from all round the world, talking, demonstrating and all having a great time. It appears that I have been in the company of kayaking royalty as it were. But a more lovely group of people would be hard to find. We shared peach crumble, Christmas cake, desert wine, lovely dark chocolate and some stimulating conversation over two evenings and I look forward to meeting up with them somewhere, some time.
So a lovely day dawned this morning and after chores (loos and sinks etc.…) I realised that there were a lot less campers and because of the fact that today was the Medlands Family Picnic Day the camp was emptying fast and before I knew it I was alone in the camp.
A great time to do the washing and seeing as it was going to be a scorcher of a day the bed linen got done as well.
I was quite impressed that I got both top and bottom sheets and the duvet cover and some clothes onto the clothes line! All dry by lunchtime!
While I have been sitting here the kereru have been coming down to play…
They are in the pururi tree beside me going for the berries today. The tui are playing as well as the kaka.
The other thing that is really looking good is the pohutukawa as they come into full bloom.
So an absolutely lovely day here, slight breeze keeping the heat down a little and not a person in sight!
Safe travels everyone
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