Sunday, June 21, 2009
Video Blog Mk1
Hi All,
Thought I'd try and post a video for this blog. Still trying to get the hang of putting the shots together and uploading it so you can see and hopefully hear it ok. A few scenes in this one are a bit noisy due to the wind but as I get more practice at it the video blogs should get a bit slicker! I was also recovering from a hangover and really needed to go to the loo so bear with me on this first one!
Love
Nick
Monday, February 23, 2009
Summer Hols Part 1
I've had to break up this write up into several 'chapters' as I write it otherwise you may well still be reading it by the time I see you next!
Following tradition, I'll start at the beginning with the Stag weekend for my colleague and good friend Steve and will get to the trip in the Abel Tasman and wedding in due course.
Following tradition, I'll start at the beginning with the Stag weekend for my colleague and good friend Steve and will get to the trip in the Abel Tasman and wedding in due course.
Steve and I flew from
The following morning we rose at 6am (approximately two hours after going to bed…) to head to Picton to catch a fishing day long fishing charter. Whilst the sea air was just the ticket for a fuzzy head the motion of the ocean was too much for some tender digestive systems. Gravity was defied and the seagulls were grateful for the fast food dinners and breakfasts that one or two of the party had consumed. The charter took us out of the Marlborough Sounds and into the
The frigid water of the Strait numbed my face instantly and very kindly blew away a few remaining cobwebs from the night before. The visibility was around 3-4m and neither Brett or I saw too much for the 1st twenty minutes. After swimming a little way along the rocky coastline I dived down and found a Blue Moki which I promptly shot, it was about 7-8lbs. Two minutes later I saw an even bigger one and took that for dinner too. Brett found some Paua amongst the rock (Paua are a type of shell fish which have a black muscle like flesh that some people consider a delicacy, personally I found it quite tough and a bit over rated, the inside of the shell is nice though it's got all sorts of colours in it and is often used to make jewellry) so after measuring them carefully we took the legal ones and headed back to the boat.
We continued to fish all day with some success, I caught two Blue Cod, some of the guys caught small sharks which we threw back, one caught a large grouper and a few other species were caught and returned.
Steve fishing for Grouper off the back of the boat
By the end of the day two of the boys were still bent double over the side, the BBQ, toast and cups of tea we’d been furnished with by the deckhand enjoyed for a second time by the local wildlife. The charter dropped us off at Steve’s father in law to be’s ‘bach’ which you can only get to by boat, it was raining and we were tires but our haul of fish made for a feast at dinner before the drinking commenced again…
The boat we chartered moored at the jetty below the bach
We stayed at the bach from Saturday evening till midday on Monday. The weather was sunny for the most part with a few clouds floating about here and there. One evening we all went down to the jetty and stirred the water up to see the phosphorescence which are little plankton type things that are visible to the eye only at night and only when they are disturbed. Jumping in the water is a good way to disturb them so myself and one of the other fellas went for a dip and lit up the water with billions of tiny green glowing lights. I can’t describe it well enough to do it justice and I don’t have any pictures but despite it being a bit nippy I’d do it again in a heartbeat!
On the Sunday afternoon after a slow start to the day and having allowed enough time for a big breakfast to settle, three of us set out to gather scallops. I love eating scallops and luckily I can dive well enough to gather them too so I’d volunteered to bring my suit on this weekend for this purpose. The bach has its own ‘tinnie’, an aluminium boat with a small motor on the back of it. Steve set the boat up and Brett and I suited up, jumped in and we set off for the other side of the bay where Steve has scuba dived for scallops before. Having a touch too much alcohol in his bloodstream and no body else to scuba dive with Steve manned the tinnie while Brett and I looked all over for scallops. I was getting down to around 12-14m but wasn’t having any luck. We left that spot empty handed and tried our luck at another spot. I successfully gathered one scallop from the second spot, not enough to feed ten strapping lads though. Third time lucky and we moved to a spot just below the hill the bach was located on. This time in about 11-12m of water I found a good sized bed of scallops and spent the next hour or two gathering about 80 scallops (scallop limits in the Sounds permit 50 per diver and 50 for the boat assuming it’s crewed) That evening we feasted on scallops wrapped in bacon and scallops baked in garlic butter – delicious!
Breakfast time at the bach!
Saturday, January 3, 2009
Christmas Hols
Happy New Year to you all!I hope that you all enjoyed the festive break? I've got some stories from mine that I thought you might like to hear/see.
I spent this Christmas with Evelien's family again in their new beach house in a place called Waihi Beach on the East coast of the North Island just at the bottom of the Coramandel Penninsula. It was nice to get away from it all and recharge my batteries, I spent the vast majority of Christmas eve asleep on the sofa, my body and mind just gave out and it felt great to just be able to relax with nothing pressing to do. In hindsight it's probably been my first holiday where I've just been able to relax and not go anywhere for a long time.
On Christmas day Evelien, her Dad Gerald and I walked round the coast to a beach and went for a swim in the waves, keen not to loose all my fitness over the holidays I decided to run the 7.5k home over the cliffs and along the beach and I beat Evelien and her dad who drove half of it! We had to wait till Evelien's brother and his fiancee arrived late afternoon to start our present opening which was the point where I felt really fortunate to have been 'adopted' by Evelien's family, Evelien's mum Sonja had made us each a Christmas stocking with some small goodies in and it was just nice to open presents in a family environment. I received enough Chocolate to sink a ship and amazingly none of it had melted despite it sitting in my hot car for a few days prior to Christmas. That evening we had a meal at the neighbours house who have known Sonja and Gerald since they moved to NZ 30 years ago, the dinner was reciprocated at our place on boxing day where we had fondu which I thought was just a chocolate or cheese dip meal but these were big pots of oil which we cooked various meats in. The rest of my time at the beach was spent reading, walking, swimming and sleeping!
On the 27th I drove back to Auckland late in the afternoon to get ready for a spearfishing trip up north with my hockey mate Ben who lives in Wellington. I loaded my kayak onto the roof of the car and picked Ben up at 8am on the 28th from his mum's place in Auckland. We packed all our camping and fishing gear in my car, loaded his kayak onto the roof and set off on the four hour journey north to a place called Bland Bay stocking up on provisions on the way. We arrived at the camp site in the early afternoon and set up in the caravan that we were borrowing from another hockey mate before setting out for a quick dive. The weather wasn't great and there was quite a swell so after being bounced around in a bit of a washing machine looking for crayfish we swam for a more sheltered area on the other side of a bay. The visibility was approx 3-4m which isn't great for sneaking up on fish, of which we saw very few of anyway!
Having been out for about 3 hours or so we decided to cut our losses and swim home, I was pretty sick of the taste of seawater by this point and tired from the drive so when we stopped in the middle of the bay because Ben wanted to explore a rock a few metres below us I was less than impressed. Ben went exploring one side of this rock and went for a dive round the other. As luck would have it I dived down more or less on top of a nice sized Kingfish, I was only down about 3m and he cruised within a few metres of me, his distinctive yellow tail clearly visible in the mirky water. I tried to follow him looking for a good shot but with his back to me there was precious little to shoot at. Just when I thought he was going to dissapear I saw him turn and swim back around infront of me for a second look, he was right on the edge of my vision and I could only see a faint glow from his yellow tail.
All this was happening very quickly and without really thinking I took aim at roughly where I thought his head was and pulled the trigger. The speargun makes a 'clack' when the powerful rubber bands launch the spear in the direction you're pointing the gun, immediatly after the clack I was surprised and really excited to have the gun pulled from my grip and dissapear in the direction of the fish as the line connecting the gun to the float on the surface danced infront of me. I shot to the surface for a breath to find Ben looking in my direction, he'd heard the 'clack' whilst trying to reach a crayfish at the back of a crack and had surfaced to find out what was going on. Whilst I should probably have been more concerned about the gun and float tearing accross the ocean I couldn't help bursting into a huge grin and telling Ben I 'thought' I'd shot a Kingy!
I don't think he believed me so he popped down for a closer look and saw the line dancing around beneath the surface. We swam after it and found the Kingy putting up a decent fight despite having a metre long spear through it's side just behind it's head. At this point Ben, who is considerably more experienced at this than myself, rugby tackled the Kingfish which was a shade over a metre long and brought it to the surface. The trick then is to hook the fish to your float line before removing the spear so it doesn't escape and do a runner on you. We removed the spear and tried to finnish the fish off by pushing my dive knife through it's skull, this didn't seem to work as theory would suggest and with blood and guts filtering out of our quarry we were conscious that we were now offering quite an attractive feed to any passing sharks so we decided to swim the fish back to shore and sort it out there. I reloaded the gun, more for peace of mind than any practical use at this point and Ben and I swam back side by side so as to appear a much bigger (and therefore difficult) target for any peckish sharks.
After about four hours of gutting and cutting we had several steaks and two huge fillets! We gave a side of fish to the campsite owners and a few steaks to our neighbours before cooking up our own steaks for dinner. The steaks were huge and neither Ben or I could finnish them! The very best part of the whole experience was taking a fillet to the local Fish & Chip shop the next day, getting them to batter it and eating it with chips by the beach for lunch! mmmm mmmmmmm!
The rest of the trip was a lot of fun, we rigged up our kayaks with spearfishing gear and kayaked about a bit, fished a bit, kayaked a bit, fished a bit more for the next few days. After shooting the Kingfish and eating it for just about every meal for three days I got a bit fussy about what fish to shoot and only shot one other fish the whole holiday (although I did miss a few too!)!
Now it's back to work not to mention look for a place to live, all three of my flatmates are moving overseas in the next month or two and our landlord wants his house back so we're leaving here at the end of next week. I've got two places on the cards at the moment and really just have to make a decision!
Next Friday I fly down to Blenheim on the South Island for my friend Steve's stag weekend in the Marlborough Sounds followed by a few days camping and hiking in the Abel Tasman National Park before heading back to Wellington to do the Harbour Swim there in the morning before racing up to the wedding in the Wairapa in the afternoon! Hopefully when I get back up I'll be moving into my new place and I'll be able to give you my new address!
I hop this finds you all well and not asleep from the length of this one!
Lots of Love
Nick
Coming up
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
Water water and more water
Dear Readership,
Now the weather has kicked into gear here I've been a busy boy with lots to tell!
The Ocean Swim across Auckland's harbour I've been telling you about went pretty well. I'd spent 10hours in the pool playing hockey in the day and a half before hand at an NZ Men's training camp so perhaps not the most ideal preparation. The 2.8km swim started off in calm water but the wind and waves picked up in the middle of the harbour and the last 800m or so was a bit of slog. I finished 108th out of 1269 people who finished (over 1400 started...!) So I'm happy with the 44mins I did it in and getting into the top 10% but I think I can improve on a few things next year. The major improvement I could make is my navigation skills. I used the Auckland Skytower as a marker to swim towards but realised halfway across that it's actually round and looks the same from every angle. I realised this as I took a moment to look around and discovered that the main pack was about 100m to my left and taking a better line to combat the current than I was...!
Also on the fitness front I've entered a few events called the Stroke and Stride series here in Auckland. They consist of an ocean swim followed by a run and take place in either St Heliers or Mission Bay every other week. The first one I entered was a 750m swim and a 4k run, I finished 6th out of 20 in my age group and beat the four other people I knew in the race including two guys from my swim squad. About 500-600 people enter each event and it's a great atmosphere. I've just completed my second event this evening and although I won't find out my placing till it's posted on the Internet tomorrow I think I did alright.
Hockey is taking up most of my life at the moment, I'm doing a lot of fitness work outside of the two games we have a week and although it's early days I feel a lot better for it, although I tend to fall asleep after 9pm now! We've got another training camp on in Auckland this weekend, I'm hosting two players from other towns for a few nights and I've even managed to convince work to let us use a meeting room for one of our sessions!
Last weekend I kayaked to and camped on an island in the Auckland Harbour called Motuihe (pronounced Moto-hee) with five friends, two from work, one from swimming and an old school friend from Fortrose and her husband Adrian who were staying with us last week. We had amazing weather to say the least, clear blue skies and the wind on our back on both trips. We slept on a tarpaulin in our sleeping bags under the stars and dined on freshly caught mussels (and some sausages and steak we took with us!) After a few sociable drinks we went for a night time dip in the sea and swum in some phosphorescence (sp?) which were about the size of snowflakes and lit up when you disturbed them in the water (which was bloody cold even after a few beers!)
There was one slight mis-hap on this trip, on the way over we were fishing off the back of our kayaks when I noticed that one of the lures trailing behind another kayak had hooked a lump of seaweed. Being helpful I told them to stop while I removed the seaweed but whilst doing so our boats drifted apart, the slack was taken up and the lure slipped from my grasp embedding the treble hook in my left index finger and dragging me behind the other kayak! On the off chance we caught a fish I had popped my dive knife in my lifejacket so I was able to cut the fishing line pretty quickly. I paddled over to the other kayak which happened to be a double, Adrian removed the lure from the treble hook and we decided to paddle to the island and sort out the hook there. It was about a 3.5k paddle during which time I developed quite an appreciation for my index finger whilst paddling using just three fingers on my left hand (and my right of course) this also happened to be the choppiest paddling we had to do all weekend!
Reaching the island I made my way to the rangers hut with my friend Kieran dancing around like a child in a sweet shop proclaiming he knew exactly what to do. The ranger was nowhere to be seen so in the presence of an elderly volunteer who hadn't come across this predicament before I opted for Kieran's method of hook removal (luckily only one barb was embedded in my finger) The theory went like this; twist the hook in the direction it went in so that the barb comes out of your finger in a different place than it went in, snip the barb off and pull the whole thing back through the entry hole. In practise it turns out that the skin around the joints on your finger is incredibly tough and it took ages to push the tip of the hook through, Kieran was dying to have a go at it just like mum used to always want to pick my spots for me, luckily I learned when I was very small that other people have no sympathy for your pain so I didn't let him pull the hook out for me! when it finally did emerge though we had to then work the skin over the hook till finally the barb 'popped' through and we were able to snip it off with the multitool that I'd brought! Another stroke of fortune was that Adrian happens to be an outdoor instructor back in Inverness and had brought with him a first aid kit that your average paramedic would be envious of. Between the first aid kit and the fact the hook was brand new I was pretty lucky to have minimal infection in it and it's almost back to normal now!
Work is chugging along nicely, I've floated a few of my ideas with the bosses and they have gone down well so far, our project is throwing up a few unexpected challenges but it's keeping me on my toes. At this point I'm learning a great deal so staying on top of it is occupying my time rather than playing with ideas for future roles and opportunities within the company.
It's almost Christmas and I'm looking forward to the break although I'll still have to train for the hockey team. I'm off to stay at Evelien's family's beach house for a few days then hoping to go camping and fishing for a few days over New Years. This has been a monster of a journal so I'll sign off here and get some sleep! I hope this finds you all well and will talk to you all soon
Lots of Love
Nick
Now the weather has kicked into gear here I've been a busy boy with lots to tell!
The Ocean Swim across Auckland's harbour I've been telling you about went pretty well. I'd spent 10hours in the pool playing hockey in the day and a half before hand at an NZ Men's training camp so perhaps not the most ideal preparation. The 2.8km swim started off in calm water but the wind and waves picked up in the middle of the harbour and the last 800m or so was a bit of slog. I finished 108th out of 1269 people who finished (over 1400 started...!) So I'm happy with the 44mins I did it in and getting into the top 10% but I think I can improve on a few things next year. The major improvement I could make is my navigation skills. I used the Auckland Skytower as a marker to swim towards but realised halfway across that it's actually round and looks the same from every angle. I realised this as I took a moment to look around and discovered that the main pack was about 100m to my left and taking a better line to combat the current than I was...!
Also on the fitness front I've entered a few events called the Stroke and Stride series here in Auckland. They consist of an ocean swim followed by a run and take place in either St Heliers or Mission Bay every other week. The first one I entered was a 750m swim and a 4k run, I finished 6th out of 20 in my age group and beat the four other people I knew in the race including two guys from my swim squad. About 500-600 people enter each event and it's a great atmosphere. I've just completed my second event this evening and although I won't find out my placing till it's posted on the Internet tomorrow I think I did alright.
Hockey is taking up most of my life at the moment, I'm doing a lot of fitness work outside of the two games we have a week and although it's early days I feel a lot better for it, although I tend to fall asleep after 9pm now! We've got another training camp on in Auckland this weekend, I'm hosting two players from other towns for a few nights and I've even managed to convince work to let us use a meeting room for one of our sessions!
Last weekend I kayaked to and camped on an island in the Auckland Harbour called Motuihe (pronounced Moto-hee) with five friends, two from work, one from swimming and an old school friend from Fortrose and her husband Adrian who were staying with us last week. We had amazing weather to say the least, clear blue skies and the wind on our back on both trips. We slept on a tarpaulin in our sleeping bags under the stars and dined on freshly caught mussels (and some sausages and steak we took with us!) After a few sociable drinks we went for a night time dip in the sea and swum in some phosphorescence (sp?) which were about the size of snowflakes and lit up when you disturbed them in the water (which was bloody cold even after a few beers!)
There was one slight mis-hap on this trip, on the way over we were fishing off the back of our kayaks when I noticed that one of the lures trailing behind another kayak had hooked a lump of seaweed. Being helpful I told them to stop while I removed the seaweed but whilst doing so our boats drifted apart, the slack was taken up and the lure slipped from my grasp embedding the treble hook in my left index finger and dragging me behind the other kayak! On the off chance we caught a fish I had popped my dive knife in my lifejacket so I was able to cut the fishing line pretty quickly. I paddled over to the other kayak which happened to be a double, Adrian removed the lure from the treble hook and we decided to paddle to the island and sort out the hook there. It was about a 3.5k paddle during which time I developed quite an appreciation for my index finger whilst paddling using just three fingers on my left hand (and my right of course) this also happened to be the choppiest paddling we had to do all weekend!
Reaching the island I made my way to the rangers hut with my friend Kieran dancing around like a child in a sweet shop proclaiming he knew exactly what to do. The ranger was nowhere to be seen so in the presence of an elderly volunteer who hadn't come across this predicament before I opted for Kieran's method of hook removal (luckily only one barb was embedded in my finger) The theory went like this; twist the hook in the direction it went in so that the barb comes out of your finger in a different place than it went in, snip the barb off and pull the whole thing back through the entry hole. In practise it turns out that the skin around the joints on your finger is incredibly tough and it took ages to push the tip of the hook through, Kieran was dying to have a go at it just like mum used to always want to pick my spots for me, luckily I learned when I was very small that other people have no sympathy for your pain so I didn't let him pull the hook out for me! when it finally did emerge though we had to then work the skin over the hook till finally the barb 'popped' through and we were able to snip it off with the multitool that I'd brought! Another stroke of fortune was that Adrian happens to be an outdoor instructor back in Inverness and had brought with him a first aid kit that your average paramedic would be envious of. Between the first aid kit and the fact the hook was brand new I was pretty lucky to have minimal infection in it and it's almost back to normal now!
Work is chugging along nicely, I've floated a few of my ideas with the bosses and they have gone down well so far, our project is throwing up a few unexpected challenges but it's keeping me on my toes. At this point I'm learning a great deal so staying on top of it is occupying my time rather than playing with ideas for future roles and opportunities within the company.
It's almost Christmas and I'm looking forward to the break although I'll still have to train for the hockey team. I'm off to stay at Evelien's family's beach house for a few days then hoping to go camping and fishing for a few days over New Years. This has been a monster of a journal so I'll sign off here and get some sleep! I hope this finds you all well and will talk to you all soon
Lots of Love
Nick
Thursday, October 30, 2008
Alive and Swimming
Last post in August...erm...sorry about that! again...
I promise I'll make up for it in this post though! I've got some great pics and an even better video to post (fingers crossed it'll work!)
A few weeks ago I had a friends sister come to stay on her round the world trip. She was keen to go diving in the Poor Knights marine reserve which is a few hours drive up north and was listed by Jacques Cousteau as one of the top 10 dive sites in the world. It's a small set of islands about 12 miles off the mainland and we travelled up north with my colleague Steve and his partner India early in the morning to board a dive charter for the day trip to the islands. Steve, India and Siobhan all have their SCUBA diving certificates and were put in a small group with a dive instructor while I pottered about in my new wetsuit snorkelling to the same depth that they were diving at. The deepest Steve saw me at was about 20m but I only made it that deep once, by the time I recovered they had moved to about 16m so mostly I pottered at about 10m and was able to stay down there for a minute or so.
The Poor Knights are the islands in the background on the left.
View looking up at the huge cliffs above us
A school of fish formed a wall and swam in circles around some of the dive instructors and I at the end of the second dive session. This was taken at about 6m.
This doesn't really reflect how many of these fish there actually were but it was one of the best things I've seen underwater!
I took some video which I will attempt to post here, you should be able to click on the play button and it will play a clip of a dive I did to see a Stingray in a cave at about 8-10m. If it doesn't play straight away give it a minute or two to load up:
Work is going well, I got a payrise today! I'm in the middle of putting together a presentation to make a case for creating a new position at work where I will be responsible for helping project teams understand the people they are designing for and guide them through the design process in order to help drive innovation in the company whilst retaining the knowledge generated for future use. And to help me do this I approached a government agency called 'Better By Design' a few months ago to ask for some mentoring as there is no one in work who can teach me the skills that I want to learn in order to develop as a designer and ultimately a design leader. They have been very helpful and I've been invited to attend a 'Design Masterclass' on Tuesday where I'll spend the day learning about decision making tools for the design process and a few other bits and pieces. It's an invitation only day and one of the speakers is a famous American designer called Charles Pelly who founded a firm called Designworks that became so famous that BMW bought it!
The hockey stick venture is coming along nicely, we now have a website and have sold almost 200 pairs of sticks in about two months. If you haven't already seen it the website is:
www.snorkelbattleextreme.com
I'm just in the middle of refining our production techniques by building a mould that can make four sticks at once which should streamline our process a fair bit. It's all still a great deal of fun and I'm hoping to break the back of the work before the real summer arrives so I can make the most of the outdoors and get plenty more dives in. This year I'm aiming to improve my hunter/gatherer skills and am on the hunt for scallops and crayfish with perhaps the odd bit of spearfishing in here and there.
Preparation for the first ocean swim is going well, the organisers reckon that over 1500 people have entered. I'm keen to try and finish in the top 10% , we'll find out in two weeks how ambitious that goal is! Especially given that I'll be at a NZ Mens underwater hockey camp for the day and a half prior to the swim!
Love to you all
Nick xox
I promise I'll make up for it in this post though! I've got some great pics and an even better video to post (fingers crossed it'll work!)
A few weeks ago I had a friends sister come to stay on her round the world trip. She was keen to go diving in the Poor Knights marine reserve which is a few hours drive up north and was listed by Jacques Cousteau as one of the top 10 dive sites in the world. It's a small set of islands about 12 miles off the mainland and we travelled up north with my colleague Steve and his partner India early in the morning to board a dive charter for the day trip to the islands. Steve, India and Siobhan all have their SCUBA diving certificates and were put in a small group with a dive instructor while I pottered about in my new wetsuit snorkelling to the same depth that they were diving at. The deepest Steve saw me at was about 20m but I only made it that deep once, by the time I recovered they had moved to about 16m so mostly I pottered at about 10m and was able to stay down there for a minute or so.
The Poor Knights are the islands in the background on the left.
View looking up at the huge cliffs above us
A school of fish formed a wall and swam in circles around some of the dive instructors and I at the end of the second dive session. This was taken at about 6m.
This doesn't really reflect how many of these fish there actually were but it was one of the best things I've seen underwater!I took some video which I will attempt to post here, you should be able to click on the play button and it will play a clip of a dive I did to see a Stingray in a cave at about 8-10m. If it doesn't play straight away give it a minute or two to load up:
Work is going well, I got a payrise today! I'm in the middle of putting together a presentation to make a case for creating a new position at work where I will be responsible for helping project teams understand the people they are designing for and guide them through the design process in order to help drive innovation in the company whilst retaining the knowledge generated for future use. And to help me do this I approached a government agency called 'Better By Design' a few months ago to ask for some mentoring as there is no one in work who can teach me the skills that I want to learn in order to develop as a designer and ultimately a design leader. They have been very helpful and I've been invited to attend a 'Design Masterclass' on Tuesday where I'll spend the day learning about decision making tools for the design process and a few other bits and pieces. It's an invitation only day and one of the speakers is a famous American designer called Charles Pelly who founded a firm called Designworks that became so famous that BMW bought it!
The hockey stick venture is coming along nicely, we now have a website and have sold almost 200 pairs of sticks in about two months. If you haven't already seen it the website is:
www.snorkelbattleextreme.com
I'm just in the middle of refining our production techniques by building a mould that can make four sticks at once which should streamline our process a fair bit. It's all still a great deal of fun and I'm hoping to break the back of the work before the real summer arrives so I can make the most of the outdoors and get plenty more dives in. This year I'm aiming to improve my hunter/gatherer skills and am on the hunt for scallops and crayfish with perhaps the odd bit of spearfishing in here and there.
Preparation for the first ocean swim is going well, the organisers reckon that over 1500 people have entered. I'm keen to try and finish in the top 10% , we'll find out in two weeks how ambitious that goal is! Especially given that I'll be at a NZ Mens underwater hockey camp for the day and a half prior to the swim!
Love to you all
Nick xox
Monday, August 18, 2008
Hi All,
Considering it’s been some time since I last wrote and I feel like I’ve not actually been doing much since I last wrote but I’ve actually been flat out with lots of little side projects that seem to end up occupying all my time. I think I’ve told most of you that I’ve been busy designing a new kind of underwater hockey stick with two of my friends from hockey, well I thought I’d show you some pictures of what we’ve done so far. I’ve designed most of it on computer based on a stick that one of the guys uses and makes for other people already. Our main point of difference is that we’re using two types of plastic to improve the player’s control of the puck, something that most plastic sticks don’t do very well. No-one has done this before se we’re learning all the time, so far it’s moving in the right direction, the CAD work has taken up a lot of my time over the last few months and I’m looking forward to getting it finished!
You can see the two different materials best in the CAD picture, there is only a slight difference in colour on the actual prototype.
Another little side project I’m working on is to come up with ideas for Evelien’s family bach, we’re off to stay there this weekend to suss it out and come up with ideas to beat her parents and brothers in a little family competition they’ve got going.
Every year there are a several Ocean Swims organised around Auckland and I’ve decided to enter one or two of them, starting in November with The Harbour Swim from one side of Auckland’s harbour to the other which is 2.6km (just over a mile and a half). I’m going to have to get back into some lane swimming to top up my water fitness first but I thin they’ll be a good challenge for me this summer.
The weather here over winter has been pretty naff. It’s not been too cold except for a very cold snap in June, it’s just been very wet, we’ve had two cyclone’s move through in the last month and are set for another storm this weekend. It’s given me the opportunity to do a lot of work on the hockey stick but I’d rather be getting out and about. Petrol prices have finally dropped again to just below $2 a litre here (76p) but as in the rest of the world things are a bit tighter than they have been since I first arrived.
I’ve had a few visitors in the last few months, a design friend from
Work is good, quite busy with the design work for this new type of nasal cannula Steve and I are working on. I’m in the model shop most of this week making prototypes of the form of our designs, that will feed into the CAD work Steve is doing then we’ll get some rapid prototypes made and test them out around the office before getting a proper tool made and testing them on real patients.
Last week I met up with a business advisor from a group called Better By Design which are part of the NZ government’s Trade and Industry department. I arranged a meeting with him to see if he could help me find a mentor from whom I could improve my design skills and business acumen as there isn’t anyone at work with enough experience for me to learn the skills I want to develop in order to lead the company through the design process (they’re all Engineers here and think slightly differently!). The meeting went very well and Dean (a former general manager of a large manufacturing firm here) was enthusiastic about helping me out and has promised to look into a few contacts for me. Better By Design was set up four years ago to help NZ companies integrate design principals into the day to day running of their businesses in order to improve profitability so they’ve got an interest in trying to promote design with Fisher and Paykel Healthcare.
I’m off to
Sunday, June 22, 2008
Winter?
Good evening all, time in New Zealand appears to be permanently on fast forward, I continuously seem to be apologising for the infrequent posts and making various excuses for not having written in a while. Hopefully you can get the impression from my ramblings that I manage to keep myself entertained and fully occupied most of the time. And the last few weeks have been no exception.
The weekend after I got back from Scotland my flatmates (Con, Cat and Andrea) and I went to a place called Waiheke Island (pr. Why-hee-kee), which is half an hour from Auckland by ferry, where we rented a 'bach' with some of Andrea's brother's and sisters and other friends of ours, there was around a dozen of us in total. Waiheke is somewhat of a retreat for New Zealand's arty and hippy populations, or possibly where the rest of the population has chosen to locate them as all the 'locals' we encountered were bonkers! With little else to do other than frequent the many vineyards and sit on the sandy beaches it's probably worth going round the bend for.
Andrea, Yours Truly, Con and Cat wine tasting at a vineyard I can't remember the name of...
Renting scooters was a highlight and provided an excellent reminder why four wheels are safer than two... I'm proud to report that I am still in one piece but did have a minor altercation with a bush... Another highlight was the snorkel ling, Con and I went snorkel ling all three days (it was a long weekend) and saw plenty of Eagle rays (see other posts for pictures) and on the last dive Con came very close to swimming over a Stingray that, no word of a lie, was the size of a dinning room table. We tried to get it to move so we could watch it swim but it wasn't having a bar of it and we decided not to pursue this line of entertainment given it's tail (the bit that killed Steve Irwin) was the size of a broom handle.
One of the bays we snorkeled in, the ship in the background is a tall ship called 'The Spirit of New Zealand' which takes kids on a life skills/team building type of activity weekend/holiday
Con, Sam and I on our scooters down by one of Waiheke's numerous beaches
Work is great at the moment, Steve and I are making some good progress on the product definition and user research stages of the paediatric nasal cannula project and I'm getting to grips with the medical and therapeutic terminology. I've also formalised a business plan for producing the underwater hockey stick that I've co-designed with two other guys from hockey. By adding a more formal and business like structure to proceedings we hope to do a better job of producing and selling the stick. We're aiming to make and sell 1000 pairs by the beginning of 2009.
All is well in the flat, the weather hasn't been too cold here in the last two weeks so no need for the heater in my room. Went kayaking with my friend Kieran from work this afternoon, first time I've had the kayak out in a number of months and although it was a bit choppy it was refreshing to be out on the water. I think that's me just about out of news for the time being, I hope you are all well and I will speak to you in the near future.
Love Nick xxx
The weekend after I got back from Scotland my flatmates (Con, Cat and Andrea) and I went to a place called Waiheke Island (pr. Why-hee-kee), which is half an hour from Auckland by ferry, where we rented a 'bach' with some of Andrea's brother's and sisters and other friends of ours, there was around a dozen of us in total. Waiheke is somewhat of a retreat for New Zealand's arty and hippy populations, or possibly where the rest of the population has chosen to locate them as all the 'locals' we encountered were bonkers! With little else to do other than frequent the many vineyards and sit on the sandy beaches it's probably worth going round the bend for.
Andrea, Yours Truly, Con and Cat wine tasting at a vineyard I can't remember the name of...Renting scooters was a highlight and provided an excellent reminder why four wheels are safer than two... I'm proud to report that I am still in one piece but did have a minor altercation with a bush... Another highlight was the snorkel ling, Con and I went snorkel ling all three days (it was a long weekend) and saw plenty of Eagle rays (see other posts for pictures) and on the last dive Con came very close to swimming over a Stingray that, no word of a lie, was the size of a dinning room table. We tried to get it to move so we could watch it swim but it wasn't having a bar of it and we decided not to pursue this line of entertainment given it's tail (the bit that killed Steve Irwin) was the size of a broom handle.
One of the bays we snorkeled in, the ship in the background is a tall ship called 'The Spirit of New Zealand' which takes kids on a life skills/team building type of activity weekend/holiday
Con, Sam and I on our scooters down by one of Waiheke's numerous beachesWork is great at the moment, Steve and I are making some good progress on the product definition and user research stages of the paediatric nasal cannula project and I'm getting to grips with the medical and therapeutic terminology. I've also formalised a business plan for producing the underwater hockey stick that I've co-designed with two other guys from hockey. By adding a more formal and business like structure to proceedings we hope to do a better job of producing and selling the stick. We're aiming to make and sell 1000 pairs by the beginning of 2009.
All is well in the flat, the weather hasn't been too cold here in the last two weeks so no need for the heater in my room. Went kayaking with my friend Kieran from work this afternoon, first time I've had the kayak out in a number of months and although it was a bit choppy it was refreshing to be out on the water. I think that's me just about out of news for the time being, I hope you are all well and I will speak to you in the near future.
Love Nick xxx
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