Crazy lycra body suit guy... He had it on when we picked him up, he had it on that night out on the town...

This used to be Ok, but then Cam made the horrible mistake of giving me a try-dive, during which I set records that stand to this day for rapid air consumption and panic attacks.  (Most people say these are not records to be proud of, but hey! A record is a record!)  Since then, Bev and Trev compounded the issue by teaching me how to dive properly (And I use the term “Properly” in the loosest possible sense of the word…  You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear!)

Trev helping out the guys at the Paihia Dive club on a Cavalli Islands expedition

Then along came Toni with the solution to my dilemma!  As a trainee divemaster I could help her out with discovers and even tag along on guided dives if we had someone to cover the boat!  Brilliant!  I love discovers as well, introducing people to the underwater world, helping them find their feet as they adapt to the alien environment, laughing to myself as they crawl along the bottom with their hands, wincing as they prod nudubrachs to see what they feel like…  All these things are awesome, though, because through gentle coaxing by the end of the second dive, quite often you can see them well on the way!  Plus, the smiles when they get it…  Priceless!

Had enough of the kids during school holidays? Discover Scuba Diving!

So summer has been brilliant so far, Driving the boat (And then palming THAT job off wherever possible!) taking care of gear and logistics (Because Cam is the Admiral), making the tea, swapping the gear, and making sure people who come diving with us have the best experience possible!

Plus, thanks to the mighty Porpoises, I’ve had the pleasure of helping out with an Open Water course, More discovers, and even the odd random invitation to go out for a good old fashioned fun dive! (Essential for keeping your interest alive!)  Bev and Trev have always done their best to promote diving in Northland, and to this end they’ve recently upgraded their boat…  Watch out for the Pacific Runner!  Sorry, Cam, but Deep 6’s title as fastest dive boat in the bay might be under threat!

Trev and company on one of Molly's last trips for Porpoise dive... Hanging out in the sun up at the Cavalli Islands

The mighty Keri Dive has helped out as well, with the same random dive invitations, to cruise out on the Lady Rose, their spacious, warm, comfortable Catamaran.  Run by Dave and Sue Wadsworth of Kerikeri , also keen supporters of diving in Northland.  And as for the Barbecue Lunch Dave serves up… Dribble…  Nothing like a hot, fresh-made hamburger after a dive!  I fear if I go out on Lady Rose much more, I might well end up with a third buttock… (And you’re definitely too fat already, Fatty… Lose some freaken’ weight!  -Ed) 

Warm, Comfy, quick, and best of all, a barbecue! Skipper and Dive Guru Dave Wadsworth at the Helm.

Toni also gets me diving by covering the auxiliary skipper angle by dragging Phil (Husband!) Ball out whenever she can…  Phil skippers for Dolphin Discoveries during the… well, I was going to say “Week”, but during the summer it’s a bit more constant than that!  He normally pilots the mighty Dolphin Discovery 4, and has a weird passion for jetboats…  (Phil, Dave and Sue coming soon to guilty parties, providing Karl’s laptop doesn’t fill up with viruses again –Ed) One day, when I win lotto, Dolphin discovery 5 will be mine…

We have a rule on the boat... If you pull a hat out of the tide, you must wear it all day. Phil Ball Still manages to make this hat look good!

So despite still sitting on the boat far too often, A huge thank you to all the special people who go above and beyond the call of duty to help a new diver get his gills wet!  Y’all know who you are!  And, as Axl Rose once said, to all those opposed…

The problem with Cam driving is he's velociphobic... Terrified of travelling at speed...

So what can you do to keep yourself interested?  How can you take something as mundane as a taxi run through the bay and add interest?  Even give the passengers something interesting, something more than what they’ve paid for (I.e the mass transit of half their household goods out to their island holiday?)

Simple.  Let someone else drive for a while.

25 degrees, middle of summer... The earmuffs are definitely a fashion statement!

It gives you a nice break, if nothing else.  It is also brilliant for seasickness sufferers, as it takes their mind off being on a boat because they’re driving the boat.  If it’s a cold day, same effect. 

A week camping on Urupukapuka Island... But when he writes about what He did on his holiday, the Camping trip will be a footnote...

Best of all, kids, being dragged out camping for their school holidays, usually against their will, find it a pleasant distraction.  It’s also one back at their parents, usually because Dad’s been drooling over the outboard ever since he saw it and has been begging for a drive, and you let their kids have a go instead.

His Daddy's down the back dribbling over the motor

The downside, though, is kids are easily distracted and prone to turning the wheel to follow wherever they are looking!  So when Mum calls out from behind them to smile for the camera and they look around, there’s that brief Heart-In-Mouth moment, followed by the desperate scramble to get the boat back on course!

Despite polite requests, and then begging, I didn't get a dinner date!

Small price to pay, though, for giving customers value for money, or, as Toni calls it, the Feel Good Factor.  Passengers on taxi runs I do are not just a number, not just a figure in this month’s profit and loss column.  They are good value, genuine people, who deserve good value in return.  Even if they are taking most of their house out camping with them!

  Frequently asked questions on Dive North’s website list the question “Is Rich single?” the answer to which no-one really knows.  Including Rich.  I guess we’d just have to say probably, given Rich’s talent for using his personality as a contraceptive.  Currently, Rich fills his workaholic tendencies by working evenings in Vinnie’s Takeaways, the takeaway bar of champions, on the waterfront in Paihia.  He fills his alcoholic needs in any bar that hasn’t gotten around to chucking him out yet, where he will proudly display his fish-like capacity for smiley juice.

  At one point he was derided in the bay for being about as trustworthy underwater as a lace condom, with a habit of ripping people’s masks off and turning off their air, but it has since been revealed that he only pulls these tricks on English people who brag about how comfortable they are underwater, and DMT’s.  Unfortunately, I’m a DMT.  Fortunately, Not for Dive North.  Although, I bet any divemaster trained by Ty and Rich would breeze through a stress test…

  There is, however, a point where he cannot be trusted.  If you ever need to go for a wee off the back of the boat, MAKE SURE YOU GET THE BOAT KEYS.  Otherwise, with wetsuit down and wanger out, you may find Rich slamming the throttles forward and pitching you off the back into a patch of disgustingly slightly warmer ocean.  Like he’s done to me.  Twice.  One day I’ll get him back, and my revenge will be so good, it’ll be worth him doing it for the level of revenge I’m going to get.  And then I’ll be running.  I’m jogging a lot at the moment, getting my fitness up.  All I should have to do is lead him past the nearest bar…

As you may have guessed from the context, I have recently had a computer nearly destroyed by these smug little bastards.  I guess it’ll teach me for not running antivirus software on my laptop, but then the poor old thing is slow enough without all the extra crap demanding attention from the feeble little processor.  So I’ve just spent three weeks fixing the bloody thing.  And how, I hear you ask?  Well get this, you sad, pathetic wankers sitting in your dark bedrooms…  I happen to be a better coder than any of you.

It all started a month ago, when a friend’s Hotmail account got hacked, spewing out emails to his contacts that had three photos attached.  Of course, I clicked on a photo attachment, and zap.  Kicking myself really, but there you go…  The virus took the form of an antivirus program that jammed up my laptop for hours while performing a system scan, then demanded a credit card number before shutting the computer down.  Nice.  A little obvious though, when suddenly a professional-looking program appears out of the blue when you know you don’t have anything of the kind on there.  Starting in DOS and playing with the program eventually got rid of it, however, despite having to drag out all my old bursary computer studies notes from seventh form.

Now, thanks to these lame, sexless little nobodies, I have antivirus software on my laptop.  and it has duly reduced it’s performance below the level of my retro-gaming Amiga 500 setup.  People who write viruses should be dragged out the back, kicked in the head until they die, brought back to life, and then kicked in the head until they die again.

I first met Toni during my Advanced open water course. Her, Trev and myself were off the back of Roberton Island to do my photography dive, and Toni was there for her first ever drysuit dive. I was given the objectives for the photography. A shot of a fish. A shot of something on a rock. A shot of another diver. Preferably Toni, completely upside down struggling to control the buoyancy of her drysuit. This is how Trev’s mind works, and yes, it occasionally makes for a long day. It was a good dive, also, with Toni failing to allow me to meet the criteria by having little trouble getting used to her drysuit. Of course, the camera battery running flat when I took a shot of the boat on entering the water had me on the back foot for a start. (I later tried again, this time on Truelove reef. I got some awesome photos, despite failing to find the reef, but I’d already done the Nav dive by then…)

Toni (Right), Me (Middle), Energy healing chick from Russell (Right)

I got to dive with Toni again on Tapeka Point, this time as part of my rescue course. I don’t know whether it was her or just the boat moving, but we were in 9 metres, about to ascend with Toni on my alternate air source, when the anchor rope ripped my mask off. This made things more interesting, and a lot more blurry.

New to DiveOps this season, Toni is a Master Diver Instructor for PADI, and has many years’ experience in diving. She has dived all over the world, settling in Paihia where she worked for the original incarnation of Dive North. One of her goals in diving is to log 1000 dives. She’s probably already done well over 1000, just hasn’t logged all of them. Note to new divers: log your dives! She particularly loves the Rainbow Warrior, and our recent Twin Wreck run made her fall in love with the old girl all over again!

She was married to the Information Centre on the Russell Wharf for many a year, (As well as Human husband, Phil, a skipper for Explore NZ) and in the past couple of years has recommended many divers to us (Plus loads of water taxi work). Many of our divers were going straight back to her, telling her what an awesome day they’d just had in the bay with those two lunatics!

With the season being slightly slow to take off she’s been “Doing Time” in our shop on the Paihia wharf, leading many to comment she’s just swapped wharfs! Never mind, Toni. Summer is approaching fast and I’m sure we’re all gonna have a really good time together… Soon it’ll be warm enough to start the surface interval “Off the Roof Bomb Contest!” (I still think I do the best backflips. One day I want to do one at speed. Maybe not full speed, at first, but some speed…) She has a quick sense of humor, and, like the rest of us, is not afraid to rip lines out of sitcoms and movies for comedic purposes.

She actually reminds me a lot of my Aunt, Leone…

Me, taking a photo, of Magalie, Taking a photo, of Deepwater Cove. We could line up more photographers! Expect this joke to run and run.

This is where my insane giggling started, as I threaded the boat through the huge waves, smoothing the ride out, with a few awesome zero g freefalls. Luckily due to the size of the waves, all the landings were good!  We got out to Deepwater Cove, only to discover three of the four marker buoys have disappeared off the ship.  Cam, Rich and Paula geared up and descended, to find problem number two…  An algae bloom, dropping vis down to two metres on the surface, and five on the wreck. 

Off to White Reef for Thomas and Magalie to have the first of their reef dives.  Still very limited vis, and this freaked Magalie out a little bit, not being able to see the bottom.  Toni, through patient guidance, managed to get her down and Magalie and Thomas had a nice dive, with abundant fish life. 

Toni, Showing Rich the Scot approximately how big his knob will be after the dive! (Not even remotely true...)

All ashore for lunch, and I stayed with the boat for the changing of the tanks, while Rich stayed on board to talk at me.  A quick swapout, and we were off, this time heading back inside the islands with the swell predicted to increase for the afternoon.  After trying and rejecting two other sites, one because the swell was huge, and the other because the boat took a huge wave over the side during the brief, we settled on Discover Bay, off Moturua Island.  Vis and fish life limited here, but Cam at least managed to scope out a prospective Paua site for future reference…

Bev Lochore, in hat, smiling and waving. This is not uncommon.

Always cool, calm and collected (I’ve never heard someone control themselves so well when bollocking people for planning their whole weekend on the radio), she quickly became The Person You Hoped Was On Today. It was about a year later I discovered I’d been seeing her husband behind her back! (oo-er!) Bev, it turned out, was the better half of Trev, the Instructor I’d talked into teaching me how to dive.

Born somewhere in England and raised Properly, with an odd habit of apologizing all the time, Bev is not only Trev’s partner, but a divemaster, skipper, licensed radio operator (Natch), occasional lifeguard, Maker of Very Nice Sandwiches and Post Dive Coffee, and all around top bloke-ess. She also likes to dish out the occasional warning growl, ranging from the “Quiet, discreet friendly warning” (i.e you’re putting your regulator on upside down during an assessment), right through to the “Do that again and I’ll rip out your liver!” (Such as when you use the over-the-head BCD technique or walk into her lounge wearing your dirty shoes.)

Another refugee from Paihia Dive, who, like so many others, has moved on to better things, Bev enjoys reading, watching DVD’s, Spending the day watching over the precious little children at Kawakawa swimming pool (!), Dispensing food and love to Wally the Cat, and then passing the remaining love onto Trev. She is also the reason Trev wears a drysuit, I guess! (If anyone sees her rush outside and barf, don’t worry, she probably just read that last bit!) She also enjoys blogging, helping out others, and delivering rapier-like wit. Not like mine, either… Most of mine is just lifted from mid-80’s british sitcoms.  And, if you’re reading, Trev, She would really, really like an anchor winch for Christmas!

So if you ever get the chance to dive with Bev, go for it! I would almost guarantee you’ll have an awesome day. Unless you are a fool, in which case you shall not be suffered lightly. For is it not written, “And the lord came down; from an high place; and offered him a carrot?” Go on, guess the sitcom…

And I wonder what I shall receive when Bev reads this… If I’m very lucky, a hug and a nice coffee. If I’m just lucky, a cross look and a warning growl… If I’ve made a right bollocks of it, it’ll be Bye Bye liver!

Murray from Melbourne, over 400 dives! One day I'll get there...

Off to the Canterbury again today, this time with Murray from Melbourne, a man who works with other people’s money for a living  and yet still has had time to clock up over 500 dives!  People like this basically give Cam the day off, No handholding needed!

Tying up to the Canterbury the water looked murky and green, but as they descended they got below the murk to find around 15 metres of visibility and loads of fish life (I hope…  I wasn’t there!).

For our second dive, the calm water allowed us to get out of Deepwater cove and they dove the point tunnel just around the corner.  Cam was after a couple of bugs (Northland’s third currency!) and managed to snag two reds and a Packhorse in the tunnel.  They used up all their dive time in the caves and tunnels bughunting, and came up about 300 metres from the boat!  However, feeling nice and generous, I up-anchored and motored over to pick them up… you owe me one, Cam! 

Trevor and Ramone, the two reds on the right, now live on the wreck, in the reserve. Craymond the Packhorse went on to a great career as a main course.

Back into deepwater for a quick de-gear session, and Cam decided the two red crays were going back (The packhorse big enough on it’s own to cover his needs) so as we motored out on our way home, we stopped off over the Canterbury again to give the crays a nice new home.  Enjoy, boys! And stay in that Rahui, if I see you outside the reserve in a year or two, you won’t be getting away twice!

Fascist megacorporation flagship Ipipiri. Now stopping people fishing off the wharf.

The comments Wayne Brown made were not entirely reported.  This is not unusual for the chronicle.  When reviewing the works of local minority artists holding exhibitions it is not uncommon for the chronicle to “Detail what the artiste has for breakfast on any given Sunday”, yet any “Bad News story” gets quietly skirted around, barely mentioned, and in many cases, not mentioned at all.  In the case of the Ipipiri launch, it devoted most of the article’s space to praising Uberfascist John Key for lowering himself to turn up at all, and then they filled the rest of the front page with pictures of Opua Primary school kids crowded around Key.  Don’t they have better things to do than make an elected official look like he cares?  Like be in school?  Learning?  Never mind, let’s not get world – weary and cynical here.

John Key himself made a telling statement: regarding the upcoming “Nudie Nuptials” contest run by unfunny radio station “The Edge” (Where the winners got married in the nude on Ipipiri), he stated this was a great idea, as the rooms on the boat have nowhere for people to hang their clothes.  Ten million dollars and no clothes hooks?  I hear now they hand out free earplugs because the walls are paper thin.  The crew famil night led to complaints to management because people could hear other people shagging in the next room.  Through the paper-thin walls.  Nice.

A letter to the editor in a later issue refers to hotels charging 200 dollars a night for rooms with linoleum flooring and Formica benchtops.  Well, if Wayne did actually come out with this one, he has a good point.  If I’d forked out $200 for a hotel room and then discovered it looked like it was last made over circa 1971, I’d be a little pissed.  Actually, I’d want the Hotelier’s head on a stick.  I once stayed in a hotel in Wanaka which had this exact look, but it overlooked the lake and only cost me $60 for the night.  Using this comment as a point of reference, what were the rest of the comments made by Wayne Brown, and was he being controversial for shock value, or did he actually have a point?  Is northland tourism, as he claimed, actually “A Joke?”  Well, if you work in the industry up here you have a job for about 5 months of the year.  7 months of the year, you’ve got to find something else to do.  Paihia in the middle of winter still resembles little more than a ghost town, and it’s not unusual for a business to start at the beginning of summer and be broke before the next one rolls around.

Fullers, Great Sights, Intercity, Awesome NZ, Newmans coachlines. Pick your company. All the money goes to the same fascist corporation.

Plus, working on the dive boat, I quite often get asked what there is to do in Paihia.  Well, If we’ve dived Cape Brett, then you’ve seen the best of the bay.  You can go out at night and get drunk.  You can watch a culture show at the historic treaty grounds.  You can go to Adventure World and play the most infuriating minigolf in the country.  You can go to Woolworth’s.  Quite often my answer is “Ummm…”

Wayne Brown in his term has a reputation for disturbing the established “Old boy’s” club style of local governance.  Many councilors want him gone, mainly because he has written them out of jobs.  From letters to the editor again, which quite often resembles nothing more than a propaganda sheet for councilors and minority interest groups with an axe to grind, it seems Wayne is merely establishing a new order of an Old Boy’s club, but considering that’s all we’ll ever get in local body politics, why not let him set it up and get on with the job?  We elected the man into power, after all!

So:  Why was the whole incident not reported in the chronicle? (Apart from the fact it’s a total happy rag which seems to avoid bad news in the area at all costs)  Why are the comments not reported for wider public consideration?  Why are we just told that our mayor is negative and bashes northland?  If the man has good, valid points shouldn’t we be working on them as a whole to improve tourism in northland?  After all, we have a fantastic destination here.  We just need to let people know it is here.

Personally, I think perhaps the Chronicle should:  devote itself entirely to Whining letters to the editor from outraged minorities pretending they’re majorities.   Drop the brave stories of crap northland Artistes who, since Helen Clarke’s reforms, no longer have to look for a job while they’re on the Dole as long as they bash out a canvas of vomit or pass off tall piles of rocks as sculptures every now and then.  Increase the advertising volume.  Increase the size of the rag twofold.  At least then I won’t be tempted to read this pile of shite when it drops through the letterbox, and can just shred it to light the fire. 

And any artists who I’ve enraged: Rack right off.  When an overseas artist can call a janitor, have him scatter the rubbish other “Works of art” were wrapped in all over the floor, and then walk away with thousands of dollars of grand prize money FOR TELLING SOMEONE ELSE TO MAKE A MESS then it’s obvious the whole deal is a pathetic joke.  Get a real job.  The old fable “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, has, in the light of modern society, turned out to be a telling documentary of the state of social decay.

(I.e, let’s spend hundreds of thousands of dollars for rock piles on concrete called “Sculpture”, and more hundreds of thousands on a shithouse designed by a dirty hippy.  Instead of, say, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars fixing Northland’s roads so they don’t still look like the world war two Army-built goat tracks they really are.  “Welcome to Northland-Please Try Not To Crash And Die.)

Have a nice day!

For this monumental occasion we had Willem return from yesterday.  He’d been promised and booked a Rainbow Warrior dive with another dive company, but probably due to numbers on the day they’d cancelled…  Joining Willem were Andy, Sandy and their son Richard.  They all dived the Canter bury with us on Easter Monday earlier in the year, so it was a whole cast of “Repeat Offenders!”

Snazzy new exposure suits! One day soon, we will wear them for a night on the town. That's just how we roll.

The day started well, getting up nice and early to get out to the Warrior before the wind picked up.  However, as we poked Deep 6’s nose out through the gap in Cape Wiwiki, it seemed the wind had beaten us.  A howling northerly blowing up about a metre of short chop.  Nothing dangerous for Deep 6, but it did drop our cruising speed down from the usual 28 knots to an average of 18, sometimes dropping to 8 when the waves started ganging up on us!  Never mind, superior skippering skills made the ride very comfortable (I.E no-one ended up in a spinal unit – Ed).  A brief one hour fifteen minute journey and we were there!  And my right hand was aching from all the throttle control (Boo hoo, get over it, sook! – Ed)

We suited up for a Red Team Go! Entry, in a quiet bay just around the corner from the Warrior (Because the northerly was blowing the swell straight into it, as it does) and whipped around the corner, gave the brief, and the divers were off!  45 minutes later, after being tied to the wreck with a 2 metre swell rolling the boat, they resurfaced, lucky at this point they weren’t coming back up through a sea of skipper berley!  We whipped back around the corner to a sheltered bay for a quick cup of tea, and I discovered we had a problem…

Toni hasn’t dived the Warrior for years.  She’s now totally fallen in love with it all over again!  She fawned like a lovestruck… well, fawn, I guess…  I know how she feels, I fell in love with the Warrior the first time I dove it!  Still teeming with Nudibranches and various fish life, we decided we’d better add a bit to the brief about not touching the old wreck, as (Diver who shall remain nameless – Ed) steadied himself by grabbing handrails, etc.  Hey, Buddy!  You see how the wreck’s totally covered with life?  Guess how it gets there…  No, not through constant handling!

Cups of tea drained, it was back out from the shelter of the cavalleys for the open water trip across to Deepwater Cove.  With rain dragging the visibility (Above water) down to about four miles, while the guys were down on the Warrior I finally figured out how to drive Deep 6’s GPS, and had a nice highway set straight to the Canterbury, a distance of 21 nautical miles.  With a following sea, however, the ride was a lot faster and a lot smoother this time!  Within about an hour we were there.

Everyone in this camera has an expensive digital camera. Willem's is the most expensive. Cam now lusts after Willem's camera. Never mind, one day he'll find out what girls are for.

Lunch in Maungonui bay, overlooking the remains of the old gamefishing lodge, a dive brief and they were off again onto the Canterbury.  Fish life a little bit sparse today (Perhaps they’d all been driven away by the weather, the chickens!)  Half an hour later they were back, and after stowing the gear, back off to Paihia.  By now the wind had really picked up, a two metre breaking northerly swell coming straight sideways at us as we ran for the shelter of the islands, with Cam on the bow, hanging onto the rope, giggling like a child!  Well, if I wasn’t driving, that’s exactly where I’d be!  I asked Richard if he’d like a shot on the bow “Fun Ride”, but he was not game…  Perhaps he’s underinsured?  Who can tell.

All in all, it was an absolutely awesome trip, with good personalities again, and everyone in a good mood despite the weather.  Days like this are what makes diving so much fun!