Marcus used to live in Christchurch and is of the opinion that there is nothing to do there apart from drink, so we hit the bars hard and a very enjoyable time was had by all. The Bard of Avon is the third most English pub I’ve been to in New Zealand, behind the Thingummy in Arrowtown and the Welsh bar in Wellington.

Acommodation was provided by the SO hotel, which is verging on a capsule hotel. Clean and comfortable though, and the TV has a number of ‘mood channels’ – lapping waves, waterfall, log fire, etc, etc. Not sure why all of the ‘mood channels’ are there to promote a restful and calm mood mind – what happens if I want to be in a mood of abject fear or misery? Lapping waves aren’t going to help me then are they? Foolish hotel TV channel designers.

Sunday saw Marcus and I go for a row on the river while Deborah and Leanne had a yarn and JJ went for a surf. All veyr Wind in the Willows. Marcus took the part of Moley, I took the part of Ratty, and Leanne’s daughter Jordan took the part of Mr Toad. Drowning was only narrowly avoided and some restorative ales at the Dux de Lux were in order. Marcus further distinguished himself by eating almost a whole Bratwurst in one mouthful and thereby earning a free pint, much to his glee.

This week saw the start of dragon boat training for another year. The crew looks promising. We have eight training sessions; race day is the 28th of this month. Can’t believe it’s been a year since the last dragon boating – means it was this time last year that I mate Craig, and thus John, and thus got back into the sailing, and thus ended up buying Tracer.

Tracer has taken pretty much every spare minute for the last six months. She is nearing ‘completion’ now though, inasmuch as a boat is ever ‘complete’. Just a lick of paint and a piece of jib track and she is ready for sea trials. There’s still a lot to do but the rest of it is pretty much optional and I want to get at least some sailing out of her this summer. It’s been a lot of work and a great experience, doing her up.

Flying has taken a back seat to Tracer, and so has diving – apart from a few dives to inspect moorings and so forth. I did a crayfish dive up in Taranaki over christmas – bagged 3 – and will get doing a few more now I have a boat to dive from of course.

I think that most of the reason that I’ve been so lax about updating this is that life in NZ, at some point, ceased to be a holiday, and became more routine. This isn’t a bad thing – well, maybe it is and maybe it isn’t – but it’s certainly an inevitable thing. So I’m going to try using this blog less as a diary and more as a series of observations, and see if I can manage updates more frequently than biannually.

She has been moved down to Wellington – my mate John, who owns After Midnight, gave me a hand and we brought her down a few weeks ago. Then she sat on Craig’s mooring on the breakwater for a couple of weeks. Now, following a couple of dives to put down some mooring chains on a new mooring, she’s on the commodore’s old mooring. The trip down was uneventful; the boat sails very well, and we timed our run nicely so that the Karori Rip wasn’t a factor. A piece of jib track got bent as the bolts ripped out of a rotten section of roof but that was pretty much on the cards all along.

On the bringing-her-back-up-to-prime-condition front, some of the deck hardware has been removed, the winches have been stripped and half-serviced, and a quantity of marine ply, teak, paint, and two-part epoxy glue has been purchased. This has been an eye opener; it turns out that BOAT stands for Bring On Another Thousand. Also the jobs are more numerous than I’d at first thought, and they’re proving harder to do than I’d expected as none of the wood is straight and none of the bolts have moved for the last 40 years. Still I refuse to be daunted and I have $250 of Burnsco (a chandlery) vouchers which I got for winning ‘employee of the month’ which will purchase about half a new cleat. At some point I’m going to have to start cutting into the cabin roof. I’m a bit scared of doing that to be honest but it’s going to have to be done at some point and the sooner the old bits come out the sooner the new ones can start to go in…

About the only spare day which hasn’t been spent on the boat was last Saturday. Stuart is getting married in July so for his stag do we went up to Kapiti and did a quad bike trail ride. It was excellent; some proper off-road mud-bogging and it’s amazing what the quads will put up with – you can take them places a landrover would look twice at. As well as the quads we had a crack at clay shooting, archery, and air pistol shooting. I’d never fired a shotgun before but managed to hit about half the clays. It’s not that hard really.

In other news, the Super 14 rugby season has finished, the  Hurricanes losing in the semi-final to the Waikato Chiefs. We’ve done a few pub quizzes, with varied results – the best being 4th out of 20 or so last week.

Work continues busy, which is a good thing. I am trying to reduce my involvement in database matters and get back into client facing projects, with some success.

There’s a lot of talk of the swine flu epedemic. I’ve laid in stocks of supplies in case we come down with it. Not much else to be done, really!

Oops. I’ve bought a boat.

My boss’s father has sold me a 26-foot Raven sloop, called Tracer. She has a GRP hull, a plywood top which needs a lick of paint, a 10hp diesel engine, a variety of sails, a blue dodger, and a battlestick.

She’s at Mana at the moment; I’m going to try to get her a mooring at the Royal Port Nicholson Yacht Club. They’ve got a really nice basin in the middle of Wellington. I plan to leave her in the water for a month, work out all the jobs I want to do on her, then pull her out for the winter and do them.

With handicap taken into account we got second place overall. Sadly there’s only a trophy for first place though, but we did get drinks bought for us by the commodore of the club.

There’s a lot of breeding at the zoo in general, actually. They’ve just had a baby pygmy hippo, which is like a hippo, but smaller. I also saw a couple of tortoises at it like knives, and an elephant with a semi-on, which was about what you’d expect.

We did see Tasmanian Devils, which are apparently in a lot of trouble. They’re so fierce that whenever they see each other they have a fight. Which would be fine, apartf from the fact that they’re suffering from an incurable and highly contagious cancer of the face, which they keep giving each other when they bite each other. If they don’t learn to get along they’re going to be extinct in the wild within 30 years.

We also had our photo taken with a koala, which tried to climb onto my shoulder. They’ve got long claws. They also do absolutely bugger all as they eat only eucalyptus leaves, which provide enough energy to… digest the eucalyptus leaves, and have a nap.

In the evening we found a pub called the Lord Nelson which as I’m sure you can imagine had me in raptures. Then we went for an italian meal at a restaurant with Amor somewhere in the name. Like everything else in Sydney it cost about a billion pounds but was very pleasant although we did discover afterwards that it was opposite a shop selling nothing but buttons, which took the shine off of things a bit for JJ.

After that we went to a maritime museum and looked over a frigate, a submarine, and a replica of James Cook’s ship the Endeavour. The Endeavour was, apparently, a refitted collier and has about 4′ of clearance between decks. Comfort abounds.

And after that we met up with Pete-the-disgrace, and drank beer in a Bavarian bierkellar until we couldn’t drink any more beer.

We arrived at about 8am local (the aussies are 2 hours behind: insert joke about aussies being a bit backward), and got the double decker train to the hotel. Just like the ones in Holland, which I’d forgotten about. Hotel is fine, we can see a corner of the bridge and a very large hole in the gound containing five diggers from the window. Fortunately it’s a bank holiday so they’re not diggering.

Met Andy and Serena for lunch: fish and chips down by the harbour. Or octopus and chips in my case. Spent the afternoon mooching around the botanical gardens. Animal count: huge spiders, huge bats, egrets which hang around the cafe making a nuisance of themselves, eels, parakeets, mcaws, people getting married, and lesbians. Looked at the opera house, then got a ferry to Darling Harbour and had a few drinks. Failed to go to the world’s biggest imax, and spent and hour wandering around town looking for a bar which wasn’t closed due to it being good friday before flaking out around 10pm.

The bridge isn’t what you’d expect. It’s not as delicate-looking as it is in photographs. It’s sort of heavy, and brooding, and dark grey, and has lots of fiddly wires and bracing struts and things when you get close to it. I suspect it’s always photographed from a long way off. Also the arch sort of stops before it joins the towers, making the whole thing look as if it was built in pieces which don’t quite fit together.

The opera house, despite everyone saying it’s a lot smaller than you think it’s going to be, isn’t. It’s big, and impressive, and looks different from every angle, and there’s only one of it. I liked it a lot. Bit of a shame the shells are perched on top of a concrete blockhouse but from the waist up it’s beyond reproach.

Initial impressions: aussies aren’t as friendly as kiwis. Wherever you go in Sydney the opera house and bridge keep popping out from behind buildings. Sydney has no nightlife on bank holidays.

Andy-the-tri’s girlfriend Maria is head of PE at Sacred Heart Catholic Girls’ School, in the Hutt. Every year they enter a couple of teams in the Dragon Boat festival. Maria asked me if I’d like to learn to sweep. The sweep is the helmsman.

So I’ve been spending a couple of hours a week for the last few weeks learning to stand up in the back of a large unstable canoe, with nothing but a long wooden oar which isn’t fixed to anything for support, steering up and down the harbour in varying weathers, while a coach shouts TIMING at twenty schoolgirls who are paddling the boat and throwing spray back over me. At first I wasn’t convinced but I’m starting to get into it now. Grand final on sunday, and that’s it for the year.

Through the Dragon Boats I’ve met another mate of Maria’s, the brilliantly-named Craig Slack, who is a multi-water-sportsman. He’s doing up a wooden 46-footer at the moment, and sails on a 30-footer called After Midnight in various race series. I went out and did a twilight race with him the other week. I’d never done any racing before. Very enjoyable, I wasn’t a total bufoon, and we didn’t come last.

All of a sudden I’ve nearly got the 25 hours Pilot In Command I need for Qualified Glider Pilot. I’ll be taking Andy and Serena for joyrides at the weekend, so that should carry me over the line. I’ll have to do a checkflight before I get issued with the ticket, but that shouldn’t be too much of a trauma.

Had a good flight in weak wave the other week; hour and a half; went to Otaki three times. Got bored in the end and tried to get the PW5 to spin to lose height. It doesn’t. It does, however, fly a wingover quite nicely if you ask it to.

My birthday at the end of the month. By a happy coincidence it’s also the night of a major deployment at work, so I’ll be celebrating by staying in the office until about 11pm.

Beer festival in Waitangi Park yesterday in the pouring rain. We didn’t let that deter us though and had an excellent afternoon’s sampling hiding under a tent. We met someone from Zambia and I managed to slip down a muddy bank. Then we went to Marcus and Deb’s for dinner and a few rounds of Buzz. Head hurts a bit this morning.

The carpentry project has been succesful so far; the first bedside cabinet has been completed apart from some ‘finessing’ of the door, and I haven’t managed to cut my hand off or anything yet.

We had a mostly unexpected visit from Paul Gamlin, who I used to work with about five years ago, the other weekend. Had a couple of pints, took them to the rugby, and met them for breakfast the following day at the traditional maranui surf club. They’re thinking about moving to NZ; we’ll see how good our sales job was.

Kirsten moves into her new flat (five minutes down the road from us) this weekend, and Jenny comes back out from the UK on Wednesday. The old clan is gathering again. Belgian Ruth + boyfriend arrive in a few days too, but just for a visit.

We’ve had to get new work permits, as our working holiday visas were running out and our residency is still somewhere in the pipeline. For me, this entailed getting a new passport, as that was running out too. $330.  But it does have a microchip and a load of wires in it.

Running to work continues. I’ve taken about 5 minutes off my time, and on a good day it’s quicker than getting the bus. What with all of the going out in the last few days the diet has taken a right hammering; back on it next week!

On the flying front; not as much as I would like. The Kawhatau camp was excellent, and I got in about 3 hours. However the weather hasn’t been kind since, and I wasted a day sitting around at Kaitoke before discovering that I don’t fit into either of their gliders. Very annoying.

We’ve booked flights to the UK for JJ’s mum’s wedding. July 17th to August 17th. Right in the middle of the kiwi winter, so that’s good timing.