Days 186-188

I had decided at the start of day 186 that the previous day’s excitement (not to mention the wonderful meal of mussels at Smitty’s) was enough for quite a while, so I just took a day to take it easy. So that’s pretty much what I did.

The great thing about Whitianga as I’ve probably mentioned before is that it’s really gorgeous. I took a box lunch (read: pb&j) and headed down to the waterfront with a good book just to watch the world go by.

And that was pretty much the extent of my day. After finishing off my new guilty pleasure – Channel Four’s Come Dine With Me I headed back off to Smitty’s. It was quiz night and I was offered to be put on a team. I ended up with Jennifer and her dad Charlie. And look after the first round – backwards songs! – we actually were in first!

I’d love to tell you we scooped it up from there… but we finished a solid 5th out of 9th, just four points out of the running for the meal gift cards. It was a lot of good fun… very enjoyable. Near the end of the night there was the “jackpot” round. It was up to $125 this week, and the three questions that you needed to answer included the year of the last US broadcast of Sex and the City (missed it by one), which century someone was Archbishop of Canterbury (missed it by two) and what part of the world is associated with the .rs internet domain (which, through some logical reasoning, I got). So we weren’t that far off! Finally, useful(less) knowledge coming through!

Day 187 and after having seen the beach the day before, I figured that I would break out the boardshorts and hop on it. It wasn’t that bad… the waves were hitting the shore hard which made it even more entertaining. It was a refreshing swim, mind you.

The rest of the afternoon was just spent browsing around in shops, deciding if I wanted to buy anything (I actually decided to pass on most things!) but I did send out some more postcards.
In the evening I decided to head out and catch a flick. I hadn’t seen a movie since I had left Canada, so I figured I should go and see something. It was a choice between Oscar-nominated Up in the Air and Swedish thriller The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I chose the latter because of its Swedishness, among other things.

It is based on the best-selling novel by Stieg Larson and didn’t disappoint. However they had violence in that movie that put any episode of Law and Order SVU out to pasture. It was good, but just disturbing. Definitely worth seeing, but most deservedly was given the equivalent to “R” over here. That being said, I’m going to go pick up the other books (there’s two more) when I get the chance back home.

When I got back to the B&B I grabbed my camera out of the room and started shooting some video… I know this doesn’t do it justice but it was just so beautiful – even with the street lamps going!

VIDEO TO COME…

Earlier in the week I had talked to someone about something that I’d like to do somewhat. So it was on Day 188 that with the permission of Craig from Dive HQ that I joined up to teach classes.
Now I know what you’re thinking. Why in the world I spend a perfectly good holiday in a classroom? Well, I’m always intrigued to see how others learn, and I don’t usually get to teach diving to high schoolers so I figured why not.

I started out about 9.30 am with a group of five kids – three kiwis and two deutschlanders (guten tag, mein frau unt herr!) and their teacher Paul. He’s a busy guy – including teaching at the Marine Academy on Fridays (that’s what they call it) he also teaches all the sciences – your biology, your chemistry and your physics. He actually suggested I start the day by talking about diving in Canada, which I was happy to do, and explained some of the cool stuff we get to do in our club – the eyes lit up when I talked about drift diving!

Although they were working with different materials then I am used to, I was happy to chip in. We spent the first half hour going through some review of materials from last time, and then the kids wrote a quiz.

And guess who got to help mark said quiz? Yep, you’re right on the nose. There’s something about a red pen that I can’t resist… And Paul was happy to have me lead the correction of said quizzes! I put my usual teaching humour into it and the kids reacted well.

The second half of class was talking about accessories past your basic scuba unit (I enjoyed personally talking about float and flag… safety first people!) and then touching briefly on DCS/DCI. We wrapped up around 11.30 am.

Now my intention for the afternoon was to just bum around the town for my last hurrah.

However I was really having too much fun and after checking with Ryan, the divemaster from Monday – who, incidentally is the doppelganger of a one Adam Camenzuli –

I was allowed to join the five students and him for the afternoon pool session. Huzzah! Plus I was able to use their gear so as to keep mine bone dry for the upcoming flight to Australia.
We loaded everything up and I jumped in the van. Much like back home the pool was in somebody’s backyard, and you could tell that it had been designed for diving – the first drop was to about a half metre, then a metre and a half, then three metres. In essence it was perfect.

It was a good training session. The students were going through a review of basic skills (mask clearing, reg retrieval) and then ye olde no mask swim which still to this day is not my favourite by any means!

One of the students when we headed down to the bottom was having problems clearing his ears. Ryan suggested that I could go work with him which I was more than happy to do. We had been going up and down quite a bit during the pool time and if you’re not used to it you usually get your ears plugged at one point, which happened here.

So I talked with him briefly, we went down to 1.5 metres, swam around a bit, and then made our way slowly down to the bottom, taking advantage of the intermediary steps that were given to us along the way by the pool’s creator.

The last skill of the day was to do a total gear swap – which I was assigned to do so that Ryan could supervise. It actually wasn’t bad at all, except for the weight belt switcheroo (I usually wear integrated weights in my BC) which proved interesting!

And it just occurred to me that I’ve gone into the world of diving past the “underwater breathing” step, sorry if I’ve confused anyone.

I did get a few pictures, here’s one for you to enjoy of what we were doing.

All in all a great day. I headed back to the B and B, caught the last episode of Come Dine With Me – it’s called closure, people – and then got picked up around 6.15 pm for my shuttle to Hannaford’s Wharf to catch the ferry to Auckland. The ride over from Whitianga was once again through the winding roads but I had a great chat with the driver who is a diver himself, having travelled over to Vanuatu several times.

Got on the ferry around 8 pm and the view was great… it was so cool being on a catamaran, I think that was my first time!

Met a really nice couple from the UK who were working in a hotel in Rotorua and then met Josh, who was celebrating his fourth birthday. Turns out Josh was quite a handful, running around in his new Spider Man outfit… I turned into Godzilla and we had quite the match!

Thus ends the Coromandel… next up Auckland, then Australia!

Cheers,

Vick.