Week 5

 

This week was a fairly quiet week in port, moored in front of the National Maritime Museum in the Viaduct harbour in Auckland. “Quiet” only in the sense that we weren’t haring around the high seas as we did a good deal of work on the boat.

Pete was busy wiring in the new big screens to the radar, depth sounder and all the bits and pieces that have an input. The screens are about the size of a laptop screen and we’ll be able to see all the inputs on one screen instead of having 5 or 6 separate screens, each for its own purpose. It’ll include rear facing cameras and the night vision Flir camera that’s invaluable while travelling at night. It’s an amazing piece of gear giving you clear visuals of any landmasses, waves and even birds flying around the boat at night (and you’d be surprised how many of those there are). It has the capability to be remotely controlled with a joystick from the drivers seat, giving a 360 degree arc horizontally and also adjustable vertically. Whatever will they think of next?

Nick, one of the Sea Shepherd volunteers, spent what must have been a very uncomfortable day up in the cooling horns wiring in the speakers for the stereo. That comes with a liberal dusting of fibreglass dust and the associated itching. A very important part of the bigger picture though, I’m sure you’ll agree. So now we can crank up the “bitchin choons” when we leave port to attract a bit of attention – as if the boat on its own doesn’t already do that. Earthrace was given permission by a local musician, Tiki Taane to use his haunting and pretty powerful music and he cranks the 9000 watt Fusion system up to do it a bit of justice as we depart. I think it’s pretty impressive and it certainly turns a few heads. The whole purpose of being involved in the Sea Shepherd programme is to draw attention to the illegal whaling and having such a charismatic vessel to do it with makes sense, especially when your target audience is the younger generation. The first part of our trip involves visiting 7 cities along the coast of Australia to try and raise funds and awareness. If they don’t see us coming they’ll certainly hear us…

 

I spent some time sorting out stuff in the engine room and realigned the port drive shaft as it was making a bit of a rumble when we got up to about 2200 rpm on that engine. I also made an overnight trip to Taranaki to collect some stuff and see Leyla, my beautiful little girl. I miss her so much, she’s so full of light & love and is growing up so fast. I draw some consolation from the fact that she’s equipped with such a strong spirit having a fair idea of some of what she’s going to be faced with in her lifetime.

The boat attracts a lot of attention and there is always a stream of people coming past asking all about it. There is a block of luxury apartments opposite us in the harbour and I even got a flash of breasts from some obliging young lady having a cocktail party on the first floor last week. Great rack…

Auckland certainly is the “City of Sails” as they claim. It’s the Labour Day long weekend this weekend and the weather is perfect for a bit of boating. We went out on a short run around the harbour this afternoon and there were so many small craft out there. There must have been at least a hundred boats of all different kinds and sizes in sight at any given time. It’s refreshing to see people out and enjoying their environment like that, I think back to dismal old Johannesburg and how little scope we had to our recreational life there.

Hannah Ley left us on Saturday morning to go and join her family in Brisbane for the summer. She was really cool to have around and I wish her the best of luck with her future studies and everything she does. I think this experience will have made us all better people in some respect or other and she’s no exception. The only problem is I’ll have no-one to pull the piss out of now.

Next week is much of the same and hopefully we’ll be taking the boat on a final test run to Great Barrier Island to visit the folk there. Time is quite tight though and we’ll do our best.

I’ll catch up soon.

L