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Published: March 24th 2015
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Evening everyone, well what a fab day we had today and all by accident, didn't plan anything, but got in the car and thought we would head further down the coast. We went to a place called Te Awanga where we saw a group of school children sat in a field, so we went in and I spoke to one of the parents who said they had just been shown sheep shearing. Well, whoopee, that was on my list, so I found the farmer or maybe the sheep shearer as there called and he said 'sure I'll shear a sheep for you' !!! How good was that. It was great, just me and Stu there, the little sheep didn't like it much to begin with, he'd never been sheared before, he was about 7 months old, loads of wool came off him. Mr Sheep Shearer said you earn a dollar fifty each sheep, you would shear about 300 - 350 a day. Apparently one of the world records is a 100 an hour, imagine that. We had a look around the woolshed which was built in 1886, they still had original 100 year old farm equipment in there. Mr Sheep Shearer
said that a lot of the young shearer's go to England to work and to learn the skill takes about 2 - 3 years. He told us the different grades of the razor they use in summer and winter, showed us the wool before the lanolin is taken out, told us the girls do the sorting of the wool and earn about 30 dollars an hour and an average bale of wool goes for about a thousand dollars. Really interesting, he said he had about 10,000 sheep, but came up to this farm to do the shearing. So glad we came across this place, so much better than going to a show and he had a very dry sense of humour as well. So we left there and went down to the beach and found a notice saying tractor ride to the Gannet Colony, well that too was on my list, not a tractor but sounded good to me !! There was about 36 of us who all sat on the tractor and we rode a 9 km to the Gannet colony which was at Cape Kidnappers. Colin the driver was a funny excitable chap, drove us all along the
beach, in the water, lots of screams cos you're feet got wet and over the bumps, it was great fun. Colin explained to us all about the rock formations and showed us a couple of places where there were fault lines due to the previous earthquakes and one part of the cliff had dropped 15 metres, the age of these cliffs varied from 300,000 years at Clifton to 4.5 million years at Cape Kidnappers. When we reached the end of the beach, we had to walk about half an hour to the Gannet colony, way up in the hills, it was a bit of a hike, some of the oldies couldn't do it so stayed down below. When we got to the top there were just hundreds and hundreds of Gannets, bit smelly !! but nice to look at. Apparently there are 4 main gannet colonies with over 20,000 nesting birds. They had baby ones there who were learning to fly, they would try and lift off the ground and back down again, couldn't quite do it. There first flight is too Australia but only about 70 per cent make it and then the lucky one's return to Cape Kidnappers
about 3 - 5 years later, they live for about 25 years. There was one large rock where there were just adult gannets on there, the baby ones had been washed away by 'Cyclone Pam', yep she's back again !! Actually some parts of the beach were wrecked because of it, concrete from the road was ripped up, glad we came a week later. Beautiful coast line here, no litter, no people, you have to either get a tractor or walk to the colony, there were some tour buses but I think you have to come over private land to get there, so we were lucky we were able to get on this tractor. When we came back along the beach, some rocks had fallen from above, the tide was coming in fast, so Colin had to get a couple of axes out and chomp up the rocks, they were only mud rocks, but big, so the men including Stu had to move them all in order to get the tractor through, then we got stuck in mud, so he had to tow us out of there, all good fun, lots of giggling and oooooohs and ahhhhs. Just a really
good day without any planning. Right just put the wash on, we've eaten in 'kiddie Packers' kitchen, busy busy, but they are really helpful, one of the youngsters showed me the washing dryer, I really do feel like their Mum, felt like saying 'Got any washing kids !!!
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Wendy Newman
non-member comment
NZ
Sounds an looks like another great day in paradise.The Shearer was no youngster was he? Love Dolly.x