When I run, I carry one of those contoured water bottles with a neoprene handle that theoretically fits comfortably in your hand. It holds about a 1/2 liter of water, which can generally get me through a 5-8 km run quite easily. Well, here in New Zealand, that is. Back in Mexico, I can remember doing some beach runs where my goal was stop at 5 km or when I ran out of water, whichever happened first, and I almost always ran out of water first. Sometimes I barely made it a mile. Anyway, here in New Zealand where the summertime weather is much more mild, I’ve been gradually increasing my mileage. The other day I headed out with my trusty little water bottle with the intent of going 12 km (~7.5 miles). It wasn’t especially warm, but it was especially humid, and I went into water conservation mode at about 5 km (meaning I didn’t just chug whenever I felt like it), and I totally ran out of water at about 9 km. I run-walked the last 2k and was never at any risk of dehydration or anything, but as I made my way from the end of my run to the marina showers, the significance of this event occurred to me. I am now back into “long run” territory, the boundary between “regular” run and “long” run being defined by the necessity of donning the camel back instead of the water bottle. I’ve been using the camel back for long hikes, but now it’s time to break it out for my runs. I love the camel back. It’s comfortable and has convenient pockets for snacks and a cell phone and it has gotten me through many memorable half marathons and one full marathon. Maybe with the camel back my next 12 km run can actually be a full 12 km.
New Zealand has been good for me. I have reached a running plateau of 8-10k, so as much as I hate to admit it, it’s time to add speed-work back in. I despise speed work while in the act, but I always love the strength and speed I get from doing it. Every time, I mean every time I have PR’d in a road race it’s been after extensive interval training on a track. The interval distance I would choose seemed to make less of a difference than the fact that I was doing it at all. So, yesterday I pumped myself up and headed out behind the Opua boatyard to the cycle track and did 5k of the following intervals:
1 x 0.2k sprint 1 x 0.1k walk 1 x 0.2k jog
Felt good. Today will be a “long run” if/when it stops raining.
Tonight we are anchored in the picturesque harbor of Whangaroa. We had a normal school day and then hiked up to a peak which gave us a spectacular 360 degree view of the harbor and the surrounding countryside. We barbecued chicken and sausages for dinner, but if that’s surprising given the fact that we ALWAYS have some sort of tasty, fresh caught seafood on board, just know that we also prepared some yellowtail kingfish poke to marinate in the fridge for lunch tomorrow afternoon. After dinner, the boys started their nightly dishes ritual, which starts with heating up some water on the stove and rinsing off the dishes in the sea water from the back swim steps. (Lady Carolina boys, Kyle and Joel, oh how they miss you guys!) As I was sitting in the cockpit enjoying a glass of wine while this was going on I heard Brenden exclaim, “Oh no!” When I asked him what was wrong, assuming perhaps a dish or utensil was dropped overboard while getting rinsed, he responded with, “…the little fishy almost swam into the tentacles of the jellyfish!” I responded, “Wow, that’s quite a show you’re watching there.” He said, “Yeah, I can’t really see them anymore…”
A few moments went by with all of this seeming perfectly normal until I had a total internal freak out moment. Holy @#$! My son is watching sea life drama unfold while he’s doing dishes, and this is all totally, perfectly normal. This was sort of an extension of a mini-internal freak out moment I had the other day when a fellow cruising mom made the comment to me about her family being a bit boring. The cruising life becomes so normal to us sometimes we forget how different our lives really are from the mainstream. Boring!?!? Not a chance.
Now that we are over the halfway mark of our journey I sometimes wonder about the reintegration process. Have we been gone so long that the connections I had to people back home might be strained? Can we even understand each other anymore? I worry and wonder.
Tim and Jack had a guy’s only spear fishing adventure at Three Kings Islands. They each speared monster yellowtail kingfish and maybe they had a little bit of fun. Tim made a movie trailer teaser, if you haven’t seen it, check it out here.
Today we were stuck walking around town with a brochure and a camera. here are the pictures we took. Brenden and Alex.
This is a picture of the courthouse of 1892 and of the of the 1890 wharf store. #1-2The Mangonui war memorial hall. #3The Three Early Cottages. Made in 1860. #4The sailor’s grave. he died drowning in the Mangonui harbor. #5The harbor entrance pa viewing point. #6whakaangi-kainga o gnati kahu viewing point. #7Saint Andrew’s church. #8The Mangonui school. #9An early colonial villa. #10The original school and county council building. #11The old oak hotel. #13, yes we missed twelve.well I’m sure you can read the sign. #14Here is a viewing point for the Flax Mill Site. Very stinky!The leser buildings. site 16This is the Crick Cottage, built in 1864. siteThe church is actually just right of this photo. site 18This is the Mangonui Hotel. site 20The Mangonui general store. site 22
Mangonui is a cute little tourist town. It has a small grocery store, a small liquor store, a couple coffee shops, several restaurants (fish and chips, burgers, Thai, Indian, and Mexican), and an abundance of holiday accommodations. There’s also a small boating community here as evident by the numerous privately owned mooring balls and the small Mangonui Cruisers Club whose windows I peered through this morning before they had opened up for the day. Like the town of Russell, there is a lot of history here. And although Mangonui lacks most of Russell’s charm I can still see it’s draw as a relaxing getaway destination. The people at the visitor information center give you that small town feel and are happy to chat with you about this or that and point you in the direction of whatever interests you. It’s been a nice place to get in some short, leisurely runs, but it would be a tough place to get in a long run without doing laps or running along the highway. I’ve been in many places where I’ve had to do laps, but since coming to New Zealand I’ve been pretty spoiled so far.
Also like Russell, Mangonui has a “Heritage Trail,” which is basically just a self-guided walk about the area to marked historical sites, ranging from 100+ year old re-purposed buildings to views across the harbor of Maori Pa sites. Since we were going to be here a few days, I had what I thought was a great idea for a school project for the boys. Instead of doing their regular daily school work I gave them the option of taking a camera to shore and snapping photos of each of the sites on the Heritage Trail and then making an electronic photo album. They didn’t choose that option in Russell, but if it’s the only alternative to their regular school work I thought maybe they’d bite. Not a chance. They grudgingly chose to do the Heritage Trail, but only after asking me how long the trail was and how many sites there were and figuring out that it would be quite a bit less time than regular school. I tried to pump them up about it. I told them they could be as creative as they wanted with the photos. The ONLY criteria was that each of the heritage sites were captured in a photo. I didn’t care who or what else they might decide to include. They still weren’t biting. They moaned and groaned about how boring it was going to be. Then, I even suggested they take “Little Woof,” one of Brenden’s favorite stuffed animals, and put him in each of the photos. Nope. More moaning and groaning. I couldn’t believe this was less than 24 hours from when I was writing about how great my boys are for stepping up and salvaging a fallen cell phone. As they continued to moan and groan about how boring this would be, I finally just told them that it would only be as boring as they make it. They have the opportunity to make this fun. It’s totally up to them.
As they dinghied off to shore, I was still hopeful, but alas, it was not to be. They came back with boring photos and made a boring photo album with boring captions.
I guess I failed at young teen motivational tactics. But they also failed at wearing down mom, so at least I have that.
-D.
One of the sites along the heritage trail
Click here to see their complete boring photo album.
One quiet afternoon, I was just relaxing on the boat. Then, all of a sudden, I hear a yelp come from outside. It turns out our friend Camille dropped her phone in the water and needed help diving for it.
Because we were in New Zealand at the time, the water was supposed to be really cold, but when I dove in it was actually refreshing. We had masks and fins already, so I slipped them on quickly and started diving. Also, I couldn’t see anything because it was so muddy, and I accidentally slammed into the ground. Luckily, the ground was soft and didn’t hurt that bad.
After diving with Camille for a little while Alex got out the Huka and we took turns using that. When I got to use it, it seemed like I was never going to find it. All I wanted to do was get out and dry off, but I really wanted to know if the phone would still work even though it was sitting on the bottom for an hour. Then, after all this time, I see it, and so I grab it and shoot to the top.
That night as I lay in bed thinking about what happened earlier that day, I realized that as long as I keep trying, anything is possible.
Day before yesterday we did some crew swapping with Iguana (our buddy boat). Tim went with Jack on Iguana on an overnight passage up to Three Kings Island, which is north of North Cape and a notorious fishing spot. Camille stayed with the boys and me on Exodus in a nice protected spot in Mangonui Harbor. There is a cute little tourist town here with a few restaurants and shops and a community cat that keeps them “mice free,” at least according to a little sign on one of the shops.
Yesterday, our friend Briana drove up from Opua to join us for some wine drinking, window shopping, cooking, and general female camaraderie. I joked with Tim before he left that he should take the boys too, since they would be seriously crashing my girlfriend time. It turns out to be a really good thing they were here with us.
After a shore excursion, we were arriving back to Exodus, and as Camille was climbing out of the dinghy I caught a brief visual of her phone teetering at the edge of her pocket. And while I’m yelling, “Your phone! Your phone!” I watch it fall out, splash into the water, and quickly disappear. I had that sick feeling when it really hit me what had happened, but I’m sure I didn’t feel half as sick as Camille did when she realized it was her phone that took the plunge. We called the boys out to quickly get in the water to help find it, and we dropped a GPS waypoint on the chartplotter so that we would maintain a rough idea of where the phone splashed down as Exodus swings about her anchor. Brenden was in the water first. He dove down and came up with a report that it was only about 10 feet deep, and he was yelling for someone to toss him his gloves, because his hands were freezing. You’d think 10 feet would be a piece of cake for them to recover a dropped object, because I think Brenden’s record is 42 feet to salvage a wayward plate. But the problem was the visibility, which was so bad Brenden said he almost hit his face on the bottom.
Camille was quickly behind Brenden into the water and the two of them tried for a while, but both became discouraged. It was just too hard to search for it while free diving when you had to be right on the bottom to see anything. So, Briana and I became convinced that we needed to get the hookah out it order to find it. Camille wasn’t totally on board that it was worth the effort, since she was the one that already had the first hand experience of trying to find that needle in the haystack, but Briana and I persisted. Especially Briana. She had used our hookah before (at Minerva Reef) so she was willing to be the one to use it. However, Camille is a diver and after a couple of questions about how the hookah works she decided she was comfortable doing it.
The hookah is basically a gas engine that drives a compressor. So, instead of carrying a tank of compressed air on your back like regular scuba diving, when you are using the hookah your air source is at the surface and you are connected to it by a long hose. Alex became a really important part of the process at this point, because I had never set up the hookah before, and because Alex is often Tim’s helper in all sorts of things, it turned out he had a good idea of how to set it up, start it, and operate it. One of Camille’s questions was, “where is the air intake?” since she was rightfully concerned about the possibility of breathing in the engine exhaust fumes. Alex remembered that the flag pole doubles as an air intake pipe so that it’s pulling in air from further away from the engine. So, he got that out and quickly attached it.
The hookah definitely made the search easier, but it was hard to stay on the bottom, so Camille asked for a weight belt. It turned out that Tim took our weight belts with him, which seemed reasonable to me at the time. We had absolutely no intention of doing any diving while he was away. So, Alex dug out one of the weight belts that actually came with the hookah, but then we realized we didn’t have any weights either. So, Briana and I searched around and the only thing we could come up with that would fit in that belt was some galvanized shackles in the linen closet, a.k.a. Tim’s spares locker. It wasn’t much weight, but it helped a little bit. Brenden was very interested in the status of the search and kept an eye on Camille hoping she would come up with the phone. I asked him if he would get in and help some more, and he slowly moped over to grab his gear as if I was forcing him to. I quickly said, “well, you don’t have to, of course.” But I had put the thought back into his brain, and I watched him continue to think about it and go over and test the water again to try and decide what he was going to do. When Camille gave up the search, and I started to tell Alex to shut down the hookah engine, Brenden made it clear he was getting back in for one more go at it. We all cheered him on, and I speculated that he had visions of being the hero dancing around in his head. He was in the water just a few minutes when he came up with a carrot stick that he found on the bottom. We had tossed a bunch of dried out carrot sticks overboard the night before, so we got a chuckle over that find. He kept searching and searching and we were all getting a bit defeated when we saw Brenden’s arm extending out of the water holding the phone. It was such a triumphal moment and we cheered and high fived and joked how Brenden could pretty much name his price for his recovery reward. Chocolate or ice cream? We still aren’t sure what he’ll choose.
Later I asked him what he was thinking, that is, what made him get back in the water and keep looking for it. I sincerely think he was motivated by those visions of being the hero, but he surprised me with his response. He said he was just really curious whether or not the phone would work again. I have no idea if it was a genuine response, but either way, I am pretty happy with it. He wasn’t flashy, and he didn’t play up any drama. And then there’s Alex, who did so much to help us with the entire process. We joked how he had one of those behind the scenes crucial jobs that just doesn’t get any of the glory. He gave a slight grin. No fanfare there, either. They both kept it real. My dad will be proud.
-D.
Brenden recovers the phone! (OK, so this was a staged reenactment, but I think it’s pretty representative of the real moment.)
P.S. We still don’t know if the phone will work. It is made by Caterpillar, and is actually a waterproof phone, but when Camille opened it up, there was still water inside. She dried it out and now it’s still sitting in a container of rice. Hopefully, this will turn out to be a happy ending.
After almost two years since leaving home, I made a momentous switch during my run yesterday.
I switched the unit of distance on my Garmin from miles to kilometers.
What!?!
Friends at home might be thinking that is blasphemy while my non-American friends are probably thinking, “Well, it’s about time.”
It was actually an uneventful switch, made without much thought. Basically, I was going for a trail run and the sign said it was 4.3 km to Rainbow Falls, and since the markers were in km, I figured I’d track my progress in km as well. Only after the fact did the significance hit me. I am now officially part of the rest of the world. Soon I’ll rattle off kilometers, kilograms, degrees Celsius, etc., without that awkward pause we Americans usually have as we’re mentally doing to the conversion to our crazy, yet intuitive to us since we grew up with it, system of units.
But in the meantime, while I still DO need to do those conversions in my head, I’ll take advantage of an unforeseen benefit. You see, when the pace shows up as min/km, instantaneously I have no idea how fast I’m really running, because I need to do the conversion first. And after awhile runners mush brain kicks in and I can’t even do the conversion to min/mile to save my life. This means I can’t judge myself for running too slow, even if I want to. And yesterday’s run was most enjoyable. It was along a track (aka trail) from the Kerikeri basin to Rainbow Falls passing Wharepuke falls along the way. The track is well maintained and there aren’t too many steep sections, so it was perfect for a run. The canopy was pretty thick, though, so my Garmin kept losing lock on the GPS satellites. For long section of the track I only got credit for the distance as the crow flies, but I’m trusting the signs: 4.3 km each way.
Preface by Mom: We went to the Kawiti Glowworm Caves the other day, and this is the resulting writing assignment. Homeschooling on a boat, one of the things the boys miss out on is group projects, so I’m going to start having them do some projects together. This was our first experiment with this concept.
Glow Worms
Glow worms aren’t exactly worms. They are the larvae of a fungus gnat. The glow worm likes to live on the ceiling of a cave so if you go spelunking, watch out! They might fall on your head.
Glow worms are small worms (2.5 cm) that have the ability to make their tails glow. They glow for a reason, but we’ll get to that later. Glow worms eat insects that fly around in the cave while it rains outside. That’s right Glow worms live in caves, how else could you see their glow.
The glow worm starts out as an egg laid by a fungus gnat. Then the egg hatches into a larvae after about two to three weeks. The larvae catches food in a web that it makes and lives like that for three to six months (depending on how much food it gets). After the elapsed time spent as a larvae ,the glow worm spins itself a cocoon, and staying like that for about two weeks before transforming into a fungus gnat. The gnat doesn’t have a mouth, so it has to find a mate and lay the eggs in about three days before it dies.
Now back to the glow of the worms. The reason for this glow is… wait, wait, wait. Let’s start with the web they spin below them. It can get from 2cm to half a meter. The reason for this web is to catch insects in them. What are the chances of a bug flying through it? Very low, but that’s when the glow comes into play. The glow attracts the insects toward the web, and when the insect gets stuck in the web the glow worm sucks it up and eats the insect. Now that its eaten it dims its glow to save energy.
If you ever find a glow worm, do not touch it. If you do, the sticky webs will probably stick to you and their light will dim. Same happens if you shine a bright light directly at them. Also their lights take a long time to brighten back up, which takes about four to five hours. So when you come across glow worms, please be careful for other people might enjoy them.
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Gresham Family Exodus 