On Thursday night I thought I'd organise a Canyoning adventure with a slight difference, it's all in the dark! Well after another email around work, I only received 1 reply this time. Yep, I work with 119 people who can come up with a lame excuse to not have fun ;o)
Luckily for me, my housemate Jen found a few people to take along so we ended up with 8 people in total who were keen, and so off we went to Piha canyon for a bit of an adventure.

The idea of canyoning is to start at the top of a mountain and follow a river down to sea level, traversing caves, waterfalls and rocks on the way down. For this particular canyon, we had to abseil down a waterfall, climb through a cave network and take a running jump off a cliff into pitch blackness, hoping to land on the water below and miss the rocks.

Great fun!



Abseiling down the waterfall


Clambering through a cave

After saying that I'd never, ever go dragon boating again, the inevitable happened and once again I found myself in a dragon boat over the weekend. Due to a spate of injuries amongst the original crew, I was asked as to come in as a late replacement and, like a complete sucker, I agreed. Sadly this year the crew wasn't quite match up to the same standard as previous years and I arrived to a lot of debate about how to paddle, how to race and what we should do. Basically a typical bunch of nerds, one of which had actually written a computer program to work out how best to seat everyone according to their weight!

True to form, we came dead last in the corporates division, but salvaged some pride by beating the All Womens' Breast Cancer Survivors 4th team. (The other 3 Cancer survivor teams beat us!)

I'll say it again, never, ever, ever again.





Notice the wake of the other boat next to us, we only lost this race by 2 boat lengths!

This Saturday just gone, I organised a "Tree Adventure" ( http://www.tree-adventures.com/whoodhill/index.htm ) for my work. Sadly only 2 work collegues were up for the challenge out of 120 people! Blimey, you can take a horse to water........

The adventure is basically 8 courses around a wood, each course consists of various obstacles which need to be traversed, all at a height of at least 6 meters. There's flying foxes, cargo nets, monkey ropes, swings and even a suspended surfboard which all need to be traversed. Obviously there's a safety harness, but it's still hilarious and I was lucky to have a bunch of great people to go with.

Anyhoo, we arrived, had a briefing and there we were set loose. It took about 3 hours in total after which we drove to the beach and had a refreshing swim. Nice!

Here's the obligatory photos! Sorry for the late post but my camera's gone missing so I had to grab these from a friend.

We had 2 kitesurfing professionals over in NZ for the weekend, Shannon Best and Clinton Bolton, both representing Best Kiteboarding. As such, the local Best dealer put on a great kitesurfing weekend and most Auckland kiters turned up at some point to check out what was happening.
On Saturday, we kited at Whangaparaoa (say that when you've had a couple of beers) and there was a good 20-30 kiters out at a time, which is insanely crowded for Auckland. The day was pretty good although the wind was quite gusty, luckily there was plenty of people to have a chat with and generally hang out.
That night we all had a few beers and unfortunately I challenged Clinton Bolton, one of the pro's, to a trick contest the following morning. Damn that beer!
Luckily all had been forgotten by the following morning and we headed out to Muriwai to scope out some waves. I have to say this day was one of the best kitesurfing days I've ever had. Even Shannon and Clinton got very excited when they saw the conditions and they rushed out as quickly as they could. The waves were a nice 2-3 foot with a long period between, the wind was a good 20 knots and there was flat sections everywhere. A "perfect playground" to quote Shannon Best.

After a solid 4-5 hours of kiting, everyone decided their bones had taken enough punishment and everyone packed up, had a sausage sandwich in the carpark courtesy of a travel BBQ set and had a chat about the weekend. Shannon and Clinton both turned out to be really nice blokes and were genuinely happy with the welcome they'd received.

More pictures should be coming later, it'll be easy to spot me as I was generally the only one not on a Best kite!