Day II - watching waves

A bit of a sleep-in was justified but ultimately hardly helped our cause... I was awake at 4am but its not particularly civil to wake other people up at super early times so it was after 7 before I re-awoke. Si and Greig were up and about and Nik followed soon after. A bit of muesli and we set about making lunches. Round about then Nik and Si start talking ping-pong. Seems that they have unearthed in each other a love of hitting the little white ball, so soon we're finishing off the table Nik's been building and then passing up the bits to Nik's deck. Then they're off! It's Kung-Fu-Chu Vs the Pale Paddle Pirate!



Meanwhile I check the forecasts and they seem to strangely (ehem) diverge from reality. "10 kt SE easing" doesn't quite match with the tree rattling breeze. We get out there about 11.30 and poking the nose around the corner we know that Mayor and Penguin are out so try for Motiti to see if we can find something over the reefs. But the breeze freshens and we're soon bashing into chop that's just short of white-capping. I'm a bit worried for Simon but his Paihia Bombs seem to be working, plus he's got crystallised ginger onboard. We pull the pin and decide to just drift and deploy burley to see if we can get a shark up. I rig one of Simon's flies with a wire leader and he rigs the Super 14 on his big rod. Soon a good mako turns up. Fresh chomp marks around his head indicate some sort of run in with a bigger bitie. He stays with us for about 30 minutes, all the time ignorning the fly that's dangling so yummily in his face. Grieg fed the fly to it, stripped it, dropped it on his nose. Again vis was crap with breaking waves so several times we lost sight of him for good periods of time. Eventually the burley ran out so we kicked off for home.

I took my leave early so I could get home to have tea with the family. A slight detour to drop off some wading boots that Nik had sold to Simon Runting (we arranged a fishing trip) and I was home. Nice thing about fly fishing is that there reaely is a big mess to tidy, no sticky stinky bait etc so everything was packed away before 6.

Great couple of days, pity about the weather!