Weed mat stumps anchor or Wetsuit shrinks.
I am deep in my post meridian slumber when an urgent voice alerts us with a call of ‘Wild Bird’. It was not your normal blood curdling scream, and The Admiral thought it was just another random visitor. If so, this would have been another highlight of our day. Yesterday’s highlight was the view encountered on a walk to Cape Brett. That was after one hour hike to a summit viewpoint.
Me and my better half near Cape Brett
We had each started off with a headache and two paracetamol tablets dissolved in our blood stream, and were doing this activity because it was there. Knock the bastard off stuff, but not being beekeepers, were feeling our age. Or was that the virus hijacking our metabolism? The previous day’s highlight was spearing a butter fish for dinner.
Charter boat held tight to Wild Bird
I had left my previous job with a wellness gift of a set of skin diving gear, to replace my ageing gear from the days of Wild Honey, my 10metre ferro boat I had built on the sand dunes of Papamoa. In those days (the seventies) the outlet for Moray Wetsuits (sounds slippery and sexy eh?) were hard to find. A friend Snow Patterson measured me up. Trouble was, I was like a muscular bean pole after three years building the boat. Another time, another body. A couple of years later the early generation rubber assumed a cardboard consistency- it took more effort to don the inflexible rigid garment than the entire dive session. It is certainly true what they say about wetsuits- they shrink with age. My body had developed, in Kiwi idiom, a puku. Maori for stomach, but Pakeha translation is now the extended layer of middle aged love handles that envelop our bellies like a stack of tyres. The new wetsuit has extra stretch to accommodate Kiwi pukus. It also has no legs and no arms. In the water I feel like a liberated person, weightless and buoyed by a good supply of fatty tissue like a set of life rings. Consequently, the weight belt had extra lead weights to help sink below the surface of the briny. Now this has nothing to do with the main body of the story.
Anyway, the yell was not for social reasons. A 12 metre charter boat was sailing in reverse, narrowly missing being impaled on our bow sprit. Some guys having a rest between fishing were on the spot to help. After boarding said craft to let out more chain, I dived in sans wetsuit (ouch) to inspect the small anchor (an imitation Rocna) and wedge it into the sand. The anchor had not dug in and was merrily ploughing through a maritime field of grass. Incidentally, one of our helpers also dived in, but in not by choice. He was not in the right condition for standing in a dinghy and his immersion was involuntary. We also tied the boat to ours and waited for the skipper to return from his walk. Back in Opua we notified the charter owner. The owner had let out the regulation 3X depth. Give me a heavy plough or CQR any day.
