Man about the house

Listening to: Throwing Copper-Live

On my own here at home for a couple of weeks while Fi and Lauren are tiki-touring in the South Island. Naturally, upon boarding the ferry, the first place they headed to was the bar, even though it was only 10am. We scheduled a photo op of sorts as they left the harbour. After mad scrambling across the length of Breaker Bay (no nudists present! Also shingle beaches are really really hard to negotiate quickly) I climbed a precarious rock to shoot from. The girls promised to be on deck, and on the right side of the ship.Try and find them in this photo:
Maybe this one would be better. If you biggify the image by clicking on it you can make out the people on deck. I think I know where they are. I like the newish Interislander logo, they certainly got their moneys worth from the design studio for that one.
This pic included solely because I like the composition. From Breaker Bay looking across the harbour entrance to Pencarrow. MV Arahura in the middle.
Meanwhile, when I got back home I found all these packages for Lauren in the mail box. She missed them by an hour or two. Hopefully if the relevant Canadians see this they recognise their respective packages and can be reassured they arrived safely. They won't be opened for another fortnight, so hopefully there isn't anything in them perishable......

Speaking of relevant Canadians, I found this picture in one of my aviation magazines and put it up for Lauren's dad to see, since I understand it is in his line of work. A former Saskatchewanian fire-bomber, now being flown privately in the UK. For those wondering what I'm going on about (yeah like thats unusual) fire-bombers dump large amounts of water or fire retardant from the air onto forest fires etc. We don't have any here, relying instead on an abundance of helicopters with monsoon buckets. Amphibians like the Catalina (which can land on a runway or on water) were/are handy for this because they can reload by skimming the surface of lakes without having to go back to an airfield.

As it happens we've got one flying here in NZ. We operated a bunch of them in World War Two. This isn't one of them (ours were pure flying boats, not having any wheels like this one), but its painted like ours were.

I like the Catalina, its kinda funky. Designed for ocean patrolling (what Orions (Auroras if you're Canadian) do now) in the 1930's, it is basically a huge wing with some floats attached. It has only one speed, cruise, and does everything at its own unhurried pace.

From some angles it can be almost elegant.
And from others not. It has an unglamourous charm all of its own.