Doesn't time fly ....

Firebrick sea star

Hard to believe but we've now been in Aotearoa for over 2 years. I had to go down to NZ Immigration Service and upgrade my residency to permanent, so next stop citizenship :o)

What have we been up to? Well apart from enjoying the unusually good weather, we've been busy... two trips to the South Island in the space of one month, so we'll have to stretch it out to two posts. So the first trip was a dive trip to the Mikhail Lermontov and what a trip.


The Mikhail Lermontov was a Russian cruise liner that struck rocks and sunk off the north of the South Island, near Port Gore, in 1986 (read this Wiki link for more details). We set of from Wellington on a Friday after with 16 other divers to spend a weekend down in the Marlborough Sounds, diving the wreck and some of the dive sites in the area.

We stayed at Furneaux Lodge on Friday night and then proceeded to the dive site - a 1.5 hour trip. The conditions when we got there were perfect for diving but not for entering and exiting :o) Choppy conditions made the entry interesting, but the visibility was awesome, with vis being upto 10 metres. The ship lies on her starboard side, so when you descend the mooring line you follow the decks up to the top of the boat and then can either head to the bow or the stern.

We headed to the bow (the pointy bit) on the first dive, finding the gash on the port side of the hull and following that back to the line - amazing to see the length of the gash and the double hull ripped open like a tin can.

Obligatory nudibranch shot

On the second dive we headed to the stern, going past the funnels and following the decks to get down to the propellor - it's made from stainless steel so no-one has salvaged it!!! It was huugeee!! The boat is a fantastic dive when conditions allow with probably the biggest collection of sea perch that I've ever seen.

The spoils from the Cray hunt (and dinner)

To round off the day we had a final dive at Cape Lambert - one that has to be ranked in my top 5 dives ever. Everyone else was hunting crayfish but we were just went off on a ramble. At 22 metres we found the coolest thing or I should say things ... belts up to 3 metres across and tens of metres long of fan worms, millions of the little buggers. If you haven't seen one, they open out in a fan to collect and feed on plankton and close up when they feel threatened. There were so many of these that the blue cod were leaving trails behind them as they swum along, have a look at the video to get a better idea. We had an amazing time playing with pressure waves over what seemed like fields of these creatures, let's hope that they don't end up getting dredged for scallops one day.

City to Sea Walk

It was one of those precious weekend days that Lisa has off and a perfect day for a long walk with Derek and Clyde.
The City to Sea Walkway starts in the heart of central Wellington near Parliament and ends at the south coast, 12 kms away in Island Bay.
So we packed a picnic, the dog and ourselves into the car and drove to the bottom of our old road, Mortimer Terrace - in Te Aro. From there we walked up into Central Park, into and around Brooklyn Park, up, down and around Mt Cook (where Derek nicked off to the shop for a round of ice creams), and up and around the back of Berhampore golfcourse. Then we looked up, up, up the next hill we had to climb which from where we stood looked like a mountain! So with Clyde panting away we started up. It was fairly steep and not much grip but eventually we got onto a proper track. This was a bit easier but we were still going up. Then we were there. Beautiful and amazing views and looking across, what did we see but our house standing out quite clearly across the valley. It was pretty breezy and we were nearly ready for lunch so we got started along the ridge. The pathway is well kept and we were surprised we didn't see more people and glad we didn't see more people with dogs!
Eventually we again reached civilisation and made the decision to walk back to the car rather than walk home and get another vehicle to pick up the first one. First of all and most importantly we sat down to a well earned lunch. Clyde finished his sausages before we had hardly started on our sandwiches and as we couldn't resist those beautiful big brown eyes he got to share some of ours as well.
The walk back to the car was just a straight walk up Happy Valley to Brooklyn and then down the hill, through Central Park again and back to the car.
We'd highly recommend the City to Sea to anyone who likes a bit of a challenge to their walks and it's not something you'd would want to do on a hot day but it is well worth the views - as you can see!