Our long, hot summer is finally drawing to a close with everyone saying it's the best summer for
as long as they can remember. We've had a couple of weeks of strong winds and a bit of rain but it's still warm with overnight temperatures not getting below about 17C and around 22C in the daytime. I have moved out of shorts and into jeans but some days feel I could change back.
What have we been doing for the last several months? Well, I've been fishing whenever the weather has been good and we've actually had a couple of quite good hauls with my best for the summer being a 15lb snapper.
Ken ,of course had to go one better with a 22lb snapper.
And an 80lb Hapuka.
Doreen, meantime has been heavily involved with her hobby, genealogy. A friend of hers organised a genealogy day at Matapouri, the next bay along from Tutukaka at Easter and from where a number of her Clements ancestors come from.
She had her own table to display her Clements family research and ended up meeting a number of cousins several times removed and took several orders for copies of the books she has been compiling.
And I guess the big news of the last four months is that we both hit 65 and are now getting some of our taxes back via the Old Age Pension or more politically correctly, the NZ Superannuation Scheme. For Doreen's birthday we met with 20 or so friends and had dinner at the Pizzeria just along from the boat and for mine, Doreen cooked a very nice roast dinner for the same friends which we had on Nigel and Fred's boat. Unfortunately, we don't seem to have any photos of Doreen's party and the only one of mine isn't that flash! We both did very well for presents with Doreen scoring a new laptop and me a very nice (and expensive) new fishing reel.
There haven't been any major projects on the boat lately, just a lot of pottering and tinkering with odd jobs and routine maintenance. We had a bit of drama last week when Doreen pumped the entire contents of the washing machine all over the bed in the aft cabin instead of down the sink but apart from that all has been pretty much plain sailing.
So now with winter approaching, the heavy duvets are on the bed, the fleecy PJ's are on standby, a new heater has been installed in the saloon and we're ready to hunker down until spring. Who knows, we may even find time to post another blog before the swallows come back to Tutukaka.
