Advertisement
Published: January 6th 2010
Monday, January 4th
The weather in Karamea has gone completely mad. It’s hot and sunny one moment, and the next it’s raining like there’s a Biblical flood on the way. A few minutes later it’s sunny again! This cycle repeated over and over during the course of the day and John has taken to calling us Noah, because if the weather continues the way it does, we might just need to row out of here in our canoe!
After breakfast we drove out to Gary and Rose’s place to say hi and pick up Ferdi’s sunglasses. He’d left them there on Christmas day and has been suffering ever since. We had some tea and a chat, then drove to Guppy’s to pick up the last of our wood. Back at the holiday park we had lunch and did our chores.
With the cleaning done we headed into the shed to start making our paddles. We’d finally decided on the design and specs. We’ll laminate different pieces of left-over plywood to construct the paddles and research suggests that it would be more than strong enough to take the load. Each paddle would consist of seven different pieces, so there was
quite a bit of cutting and sanding involved. We finished with the basic shaping around 7pm. If the weather makes up it’s mind to stay sunny tomorrow we’ll laminate them together using the resin, and then start doing the final shaping work.
We enjoyed dinner with a glass of wine, then had a shower and retired to our room for the evening.
Today’s highlights:
1. Starting to make our paddles.
Tuesday, January 5th
We woke to a beautiful sunny day. We didn’t want to get our hopes up, but it turned out to be sunny all day, with not a drop of rain in sight. We eagerly made for the shed where we started the laminating procedure on the paddles. With the warm weather we felt confident that any fibreglass work we did would cure well, so we finally got to work on the top panels. We’d run out of bread so Talita whipped up a yummy sweet-corn bread to satisfy our rumbling bellies.
After lunch Paddy came by and invited us for dinner. When he left we drove out to a spot he had told us about next to the Karamea River. We took our
Ready to be laminated
Now lets hope the weather plays alongcamp-chairs down and Talita sat reading while Ferdi tried out his new fishing rod. It worked beautifully, but the river was flowing rapidly after the last few days’ rain. Never-the-less, Ferdi waded into the freezing water until it was well over his knees in an attempt to get at some deeper water. He spent about an hour fishing then joined Talita in the camp chair.
After a while the cool wind got too much, so we packed up and went home. On the way we detoured to town to pick up a few supplies. We made a quick stop at home to get dressed, and then drove to Paddy’s. While he was cooking dinner we went outside with some red velvet and a few flutes to take pictures of these beautiful creations in the late afternoon sun light. We had dinner outside at Paddy’s picnic table and after a bit we went in for a cuppa. Paddy invited us to watch a movie on his TV with him and we gladly accepted. It has been a while since we’d watched anything on a big screen.
After the movie we sat chatting and Ferdi made the mistake of looking
through some of Paddy’s jewellery that was in a beautifully carved wooden box. He ended up offending Paddy greatly because he didn’t pay sufficient attention to each peace he looked at. Each of Paddy’s creations is special to him and represents a lot of blood sweat and tears to him. Lesson learned. We sat chatting till all our eyes started drooping, then called it a night and headed home.
Today’s highlights:
1. At last, a beautiful sunny day.
2. Getting to work some more on our canoe.
3. Dinner and a movie at Paddy’s.
Wednesday, January 6th
Happy birthday mom Corne! We hope you have an amazing day and a year filled with peace, joy and prosperity! May God bless you and keep you. Two sunny days in a row… it’s gonna snow! (we really hope not!) We were very happy to be able to do more work on the canoe and the paddles. When we finished doing all we could, we cleaned the facilities and had lunch. After lunch we spent some time reading in the sun. When it got too hot we moved inside and continued reading. Paddy and his friend Carey dropped by just
to say hi and when it was almost evening we had a shower and cooked dinner. There was a bunch of threatening clouds in the sky, so tomorrow might be rainy again. At least we got to fiberglass the top panels, so tomorrow we can stitch them to the rest of the hull. After dinner we caught up with the blog and watched a movie. We had to watch the movie in the van because our little DVD player uses a 12v power-supply.
Today’s highlights:
1. Another sunny day!
2. Fiberglassing the top panels.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.709s; Tpl: 0.013s; cc: 17; qc: 152; dbt: 0.4637s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.5mb
Ewald
non-member comment
stained glass
Who made that nice stain glass whachimacallit?