Ryan's Journal

"My life amounts to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean. Yet what is any ocean, but a multitude of drops?" — David Mitchell

The Birds

Posted from Leigh, New Zealand at 12:15 pm, April 19th, 2024

Today’s adventures included a short hike to a massive 1200 year old kauri tree, watching a fisherman struggle to get a stingray off his hook (three people working as a team eventually managed to get the poor guy back to the ocean), and literally fleeing a farmer’s market after a lady at a booth spotted the tourist and came after me with a plate of samples (I’m uncomfortable around the humans). The rest of the day was mainly driving, and I survived the highways and crowds of Auckland with the only scars being mental ones.

I’m currently in the tiny town of Leigh to do a shore dive at the Goat Island Marine Reserve tomorrow. I checked in at the dive office today to get a sense of things, and they mentioned that the weather for tomorrow is “iffy” and they’d call me if the dive had to be cancelled. When I asked whether “iffy” meant one meter of visibility or ten meters, the girl at the counter cheerily said “Oh, definitely one meter. We rarely get more than three meters, but there’s loads of fish”. Tomorrow could be interesting.

Black Oystercatcher, Coromandel Peninsula

Black Oystercatcher mid-bath, Coromandel Peninsula.

White-Fronted Terns, Coromandel Peninsula

White-Fronted Terns, Coromandel Peninsula. I’m pretty sure I wasn’t the reason they all took off at once, and they merely circled and then landed in the same spot again, but it made for a good photo opportunity.

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