Because we’d planned the afternoon off, the work accomplished list for Sunday was relatively short :
- Lubricated all pulleys and sliders
- More varnish onto shower sill
- Replaced line cover over pulleys (involved spending 1/2 hour picking out a hole in tube of sealant)
- Cleaned mess on cabin top (from gluing last weekend)
- Created sail bag zip handle
- Fixed nav station light which had been flickering
- Found and sanded more gelcoat patches
Around midday we packed it in, tidied up and had a brief lunch before heading into town to watch the Tai Tokerau Haka Road Show. The show was an opportunity for three of the local (normally competitive) traditional singing/dancing groups to showcase their work along with a few other entertainers.
The show was to a packed hall and had a fundraising (for Christchurch) element to it. Curiously they had a Butlins style host who introduced each act. The opener was a great singing chap who the audience knew as a contestant on NZ Idol. Next was the first of the singing/dancing groups. If we thought we were treated last Friday, it just got better. With about 15 females and 15 males in traditional costume we were given several different performances all strung together seemlessly. The crowd would cheer when certain songs began presumably because they were familiar. All the male led performances for this group and those that followed seemed to be some variation on the haka.
Next came two sisters, a 14 year old on the cello and a 10 year old who played the violin so well it almost brought tears to the eyes. They played 2 songs to huge applause from the audience.
Next came the smallest of the three traditional groups about the same size as the group we had last Friday. Between them and the final group was a round of raffle winners. The last traditional group was the same group of performers as we had last Friday but beefed up in numbers. They exceeded their prior performance by a long shot. The larger audience brought out more enthusiasm and with more of them and bigger acoustics their performance sang out.
And there it could have finished except they decided to bring all three groups together on stage to sing and dance three traditional numbers which they all knew. Fantastic stuff.
It was no surprise that we ran into cruisers in the hall. We ended up sitting right at the front in front of Brian and JoDon from El Regallo. We bumped into Kathy from Attitude on the way out.
We didn’t stay too long as we had a little more to do. We drove to Bunnings to pick up a few bits and pieces for the boat. On the way back to the boat we stopped off and had a walk around the wetlands area we’d seen many times and vowed to visit. It was a quite pleasant and very easy walk allowing us to see a number of birds, etc. quite close to town.
Back on the boat it was now 4:30 and we lost the will to go back to work and cracked open a couple of beers instead.
Dinner was another couple of NZ steaks. I’m going to miss these. We’ve never really cooked steak too often but we’ve treated ourselves to nice filets just a little too often recently. Afterwards we settled down for a movie.
Perhaps to try and get into the spirit of the near future we watched the 50s movie ‘South Pacific’ which turned out to be too long and a struggle to get through. We soldiered on even though Helen ended up playing cards on the computer and I spent most of the time watching the live telemetry and commentary from the Malaysian Grand Prix. A quick check on IMDB revealed the usual con about movie locations. None of it was filmed in the South Pacific. The closest location was Hawaii (20 degrees north of the equator) and the rest in Ibiza (Spain), Malaysia and LA. All I can say is “Bloody Alonso”. Nothing to do with the movie or Ibiza – he drove into the back of Hamilton.
It’s now Monday morning. Real time blog readers can get the same weather forecast as us at metservice. We might just get a continued good run of weather ahead and be out of the yard by the end of the week.