Week 6

  

week Another fairly quiet in port. We’re in the process of completing registration of the company that’ll own Ady Gil Earthrace and the registration of the boat has to be done after that. We’ll be leaving at the end of next week by the looks of things.

 

 

In the meantime we’ve been building the Mark 2 Jetski mounting ramp for the back of the boat. The first version you may remember was destroyed as it was ripped from the deck by a wave & dropped about a meter with the jetski on top of it when we were crossing the Kaipara bar in a 5 meter swell. We have managed to salvage some of the bits and are well on the way to trying out the new model shortly. The new model has less moving parts and will use two strips of rollers on a wooden frame and a tailgate that drops down for mounting and dismounting. The wooden frame is being put together by Stan, a master carpenter, volunteer and Sea Shepherd supporter who will probably be joining us in the Southern Ocean at some stage during the fray and we’ve had some help from his mate Colin with the stainless steel fabrication. It’s amazing to see people giving so much of their time, Kiwi’s are awfully generous and we’ve had folks donating loads of stuff and time. So the ramp will be a masterpiece….. The jetski is being given some love & attention by Planet Seadoo out in Glenfield as it suffered some damage during the dousing when it got submerged. We’re going to be putting a cover on it from now on to prevent the same thing happening again. Lessons learned.

Otherwise it’s been really nice just to hang around in Auckland for a while. There’s a couple of memories and incidents that will stick with me including one when Pete and myself went into the Waterfront Café and bar which is in the Maritime museum building and looks out over the harbour. Pete was dressed as he usually does on sunny days with a T-shirt wrapped around his head and there was a big scene going on with lots of people rushing around dressed as pirates for Halloween and taking trips out with punters& tourists on the classic old sailing boats that are moored in the basin here. Next thing a bloke walks up to us and starts chatting to us as if we’re part of the pirate scene. It would normally have been unremarkable with some bloke who just didn’t have a clue but the irony of the situation struck me as quite funny. The Japanese Whalers go to lengths to brand Sea Shepherd as “Pirates”.

I’ve not had time to take many photos and there’s not a lot going on that’s very exciting to the camera so this week won’t be startling on the blog. But the action starts next week as we’ll be going down to Whakatane to do the video shoot from the helicopter around White Island if all goes according to plan. We’ll have the jetski in the water and I’ll get some nice pics then.

The preparations for the tactical stuff in the Southern Ocean continue and we’ve got some crackers planned for them down there. Obviously this goes out on the net and I’d be giving it all away if I said what we were doing, but a couple of you who might be reading this will have some idea of what they are. Suffice it to say that all is going according to plan and I honestly believe we’ll have a result this year. I don’t believe it’s worth going all the way down there and doing all this preparation if it makes no difference at all to the whaling. We’ve got to make this effective.

I’ll catch up again soon…..