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
