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
